Do you approve of PPC (in some form) as the future of Amiga?

[persia]

On the other hand hobbling a system to run 16 year old software is silly.  Run classic software in UAE and abandon the constraints that are killing the Amiga.  Either you develop new software to do new things or the whole point of faster more modern systems is moot.  

Dpaint IV will run faster on my Mac Pro than an X1000, but it still isn't going to replace photoshop as my daily image editor...

Take OS4, throw out the outdated concepts and bring it into 2011.  Move to X86 and be done with it.  The CPU has zero relevance on how "different" an operating system is.

Seamless compatibility with existing software?  How useful will a lightening-fast system be without much software to run on it?

[rebraist]

someone here hate the idea amiga to be a pc. the amiga of 25 years ago wasn't because had its peculiarities.
the amiga (one) of today is already a pc.
it's a simple pc nor more nor less than an x86 one.
it has its cpu, ram, bus, hdd and so on.
it hasn't a x86 cpu but in the rest it's about to be the same.
i think if aos would go x86 it'll be only faster faster faster.
and surely for a pirated copy hyperion would gain by 2 original ones.
How many original copies of aos4 (how many amiga one) have been sold? 10000? i think less.
in x86 world this number has at least to grow double in short time.
really again i don't understand: Do you seriously hate so much the idea of fresh blood that you prefer to stay in your ivory towers? Do you seriously hate the idea that we're not an elite but instead today we're only fossils of a long ago past time to condemn amiga to die?

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Given the choice of CPUs at the moment, much as I hate to say it, x86 seems to be the only real choice for a high-performance CPU.

I guess it's because you don't need the x86 instructions anymore, or it's the multi core that makes the 'immediate' feeling possible.
I recently bought an i5 pc and for the first time since I swapped DOS for windows 95 I got the feeling the GUI isn't a buggering resource hog anymore, considering both Linux and Windows (I never was happy with the performance of X11 either until now).

[Heiroglyph]

Seamless compatibility with existing software?  How useful will a lightening-fast system be without much software to run on it?

At 1000+ times the speed, I'm sure you could handle a compatibility mode ala MacOS or MorphOS.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

someone here hate the idea amiga to be a pc. the amiga of 25 years ago wasn't because had its peculiarities.
the amiga (one) of today is already a pc.
it's a simple pc nor more nor less than an x86 one.
it has its cpu, ram, bus, hdd and so on.
it hasn't a x86 cpu but in the rest it's about to be the same.
i think if aos would go x86 it'll be only faster faster faster.

The principles of north- and southbridge are in principle still inferior to a theretical modern day custom chipset design.
More flexible, yes, but also bottlenecks. Pumping up the bitrates still to overcome its deficiencies. Not something a tech head can be enthusiastic about.

[spihunter]

I'd say port it to the dual core ARM..... Pretty soon your phone will be your desktop.

[matthey]

Wow, a whole 150Mhz?

You have to start some where. Creating a CPU in fpga is not trivial. This will ramp up quite quickly if there is a market. Fpga's will become faster and if a CPU could be burned then a very powerful for CISC 500MHz-1GHz would be possible. If the N68k could become a popular processor again, then more is possible. There is nothing besides money that keeps the 68k from x86 performance.  The 68k has several advantages over x86 as far as making a chip. It's simpler, has smaller code (translates to less caches needed) and has less baggage that needs to be supported because it has a good design to start with.

Assuming 060 performance, not 020/030 as most fpgas currently are:
x86 is clearly fastest per dollar now and will be for the foreseeable future.

I agree. No contest. Games push the high end desktop market and the x86 duopoly is able to crush any and all competition. The mobile multimedia market, laptop/netbook and enbedded markets are huge and growing. This is more becoming ARM territory but an enhanced 68k has advantages over ARM. It is easier to program and has smaller code. ARM's advantage was simplicity but it lost most of that with enhancements.

The first Natami fpga CPU, the N68050, should be more powerful than the 68060 at the same clock speed. The superscaler N68070 should be able to average several complex instructions per clock. The N68k will have fairly modern enhancements like larger caches and DDR2 memory. The 68060 performs very well for it's day. It was probably the best processor of the day but was never clocked up and killed for marketing reasons. Motorola had decided to go PPC and was selling everyone that it was the future. The 68060 outperformed the PPC processors for the first couple of years. It did more with less.

I'm not sure why anyone would want to hobble Amiga with slow CPUs, they used the 68000 because it was the fastest for the money at the time.

The 68000 was a good fit. It was powerful but also flexible. I don't think the AmigaOS would be as efficient or as good if x86 had been used. The Amiga was never about having the fastest CPU. It was about having several processors working in parallel. It was ahead of it's time because that is where processors are headed today, integrating processors like SIMD and GPU to the CPU (faster & saves power). That is also what Natami is trying to do.

Before Amiga went under they were already looking for alternative CPUs, so I'm not sure why there is such a strong attachment to a basic component that was near end of life already.

That was because Motorola decided to kill the 68k in favor of the PPC. Motorola wasn't going to produce any new 68k processors.

[Franko]

someone here hate the idea amiga to be a pc. the amiga of 25 years ago wasn't because had its peculiarities.
the amiga (one) of today is already a pc.
it's a simple pc nor more nor less than an x86 one.
it has its cpu, ram, bus, hdd and so on.
it hasn't a x86 cpu but in the rest it's about to be the same.
i think if aos would go x86 it'll be only faster faster faster.
and surely for a pirated copy hyperion would gain by 2 original ones.
How many original copies of aos4 (how many amiga one) have been sold? 10000? i think less.
in x86 world this number has at least to grow double in short time.
really again i don't understand: Do you seriously hate so much the idea of fresh blood that you prefer to stay in your ivory towers? Do you seriously hate the idea that we're not an elite but instead today we're only fossils of a long ago past time to condemn amiga to die?

While I'm not into PCs, new processors or the need for speed at all, I don't and never have considered owning an Amiga as being elitist. I have been using the Amiga since the very start, way back in 86.

The Amiga to me was simply the natural progression from the Vic20 and C64. My main reason for it still being my favorite computer today is quite simply I'm more than happy with what it can do & the speed at which it does it.

This is in no way being elitist, it just my own personal choice and I have no objection to all the other types of processors that other folk would like to see being used. If a new Amiga of some description ever does appear, of course I would have a look at it, but it would have to be something special indeed to change me from being an old fossil...

[minator]

Wrong! A medium sized and priced fpga should allow an enhanced 68k processor to achieve around 150MHz. That is what the Natami team is expecting and that is what similar complexity and sized processors are running in fpga. That should compare nicely to a single core PPC at more than 2x the clock speed and possibly approaching 3x the clock speed.

Assuming they can actually get it to 150MHz, I expect it'll have trouble matching a PPC at the same clock speed never mind exceeding it.

[rebraist]

@Speelgoedmannetje
custom chipset is simply superior to all but that amiga is no more. To redesign a revolutionary vision you need money, money, money and meanwhile on facebook today i wrote amiga. at the first place there was a picture with two blond women...
 
@Franko:
I'm the first fossil. Because i never went ppc. Amiga to me is still that 68k machine that made me think there was no other computer superior to it. But that was 25 years ago. The son of amiga today is its spirit: the os. I regularly use aros on x86 and i've seen aos4 and morphos videos. This os has so many many many things to say to the whole world!! It's fast, it's efficient, it's easy. IT'S NOT UNIX OR NT!!!
Don't let it die...

[matthey]

Assuming they can actually get it to 150MHz, I expect it'll have trouble matching a PPC at the same clock speed never mind exceeding it.

If they don't get 150MHz this year, they probably will next as the speed of fpgas increase and the price drops. There are fpgas that are fast enough now but they cost a lot of money. The 68k did often outperform the early PPC processors. Even the 68040 outperformed the early PPC processors on the early MACs. Amiga users with 68060 and Shapeshifter or Fusion had the fastest MAC for about a year. Apple made the later MAC OS incompatible with the 68060 because of it. MAC OS 7 worked great with the 68060 and then MAC OS 8 didn't for some odd reason. An fpga N68k isn't going to wow people or steal x86 market share but it will probably be fast enough to impress Amiga users still using the classic and fast enough for general computer needs. That's enough for me. I'm not opposed to PPC Amigas. I would like to see 68k for the low end and laptops and PPC for the high end and desktops. The attitude of Hyperion has turned me off though. I prefer the openness of Natami and AROS (but don't care for the x86 focus of AROS).

Here's what an IBM engineer has to say about the 68060 and PPC...

"With 2 instructions per clock and excellent multiplication and branch performance, the 68060 performs very good. Depending on the workload the 68060 can even outperform similar clocked 60x/G2/G3 PowerPC CPU."

"Actually the 68060 is faster in multiplication than many PowerPC.
The PPC G2 (603) and G3 CPU need 5 cycles for a multiplication.
Which means a 100 Mhz 68060 achieves the same multiplication performance as an 250 Mhz G3."

http://www.natami.net/knowledge.php?b=4¬e=2418

Let's look at some 68k code to see what is so great about the 68k. Let's take a simple 68k memory copy with size (longwords) in d0...

.loop:
 move.l (a0)+,(a1)+
 subq.l #1,d0
 bcc.b .loop

Let's say we don't know the alignment of the data either. This copies 1 longword/cycle with data aligned and is 6 bytes. If data is unaligned this is still pretty good. Now write that on PPC with anywhere near the performance. Don't let the old outdated 68060 with tiny little cache and only 4 bytes of instruction fetch/cycle DESTROY. I'll even give you a few hints. You better align the data first or the performance is really bad. You will need twice as many instructions to duplicate what's above. You will need to use an unrolled loop (wasting more code) and preload the cache. If you do all that optimally, you are still likely slower than the 68060 . No wonder PPC needs all those GHz.

[Hammer]

If they don't get 150MHz this year, they probably will next as the speed of fpgas increase and the price drops. There are fpgas that are fast enough now but they cost a lot of money. The 68k did often outperform the early PPC processors. Even the 68040 outperformed the early PPC processors on the early MACs. Amiga users with 68060 and Shapeshifter or Fusion had the fastest MAC for about a year. Apple made the later MAC OS incompatible with the 68060 because of it. MAC OS 7 worked great with the 68060 and then MAC OS 8 didn't for some odd reason. An fpga N68k isn't going to wow people or steal x86 market share but it will probably be fast enough to impress Amiga users still using the classic and fast enough for general computer needs. That's enough for me. I'm not opposed to PPC Amigas. I would like to see 68k for the low end and laptops and PPC for the high end and desktops. The attitude of Hyperion has turned me off though. I prefer the openness of Natami and AROS (but don't care for the x86 focus of AROS).

Here's what an IBM engineer has to say about the 68060 and PPC...

"With 2 instructions per clock and excellent multiplication and branch performance, the 68060 performs very good. Depending on the workload the 68060 can even outperform similar clocked 60x/G2/G3 PowerPC CPU."

"Actually the 68060 is faster in multiplication than many PowerPC.
The PPC G2 (603) and G3 CPU need 5 cycles for a multiplication.
Which means a 100 Mhz 68060 achieves the same multiplication performance as an 250 Mhz G3."

http://www.natami.net/knowledge.php?b=4¬e=2418

Let's look at some 68k code to see what is so great about the 68k. Let's take a simple 68k memory copy with size (longwords) in d0...

.loop:
 move.l (a0)+,(a1)+
 subq.l #1,d0
 bcc.b .loop

Let's say we don't know the alignment of the data either. This copies 1 longword/cycle with data aligned and is 6 bytes. If data is unaligned this is still pretty good. Now write that on PPC with anywhere near the performance. Don't let the old outdated 68060 with tiny little cache and only 4 bytes of instruction fetch/cycle DESTROY. I'll even give you a few hints. You better align the data first or the performance is really bad. You will need twice as many instructions to duplicate what's above. You will need to use an unrolled loop (wasting more code) and preload the cache. If you do all that optimally, you are still likely slower than the 68060 . No wonder PPC needs all those GHz.

K8/K10 and Core 2/i3/i5/i7 can process IMUL(32bit) at every cycle(1 cycle througput) with 3 cycle latency.

Core i3/i5/i7 can process IMUL (64bit) at every cycle (1 cycle througput) with 3 cycle latency. K8/K10 and Core 2 has can process IMUL (64bit) in 2 cycles (2 cycle througput)  with 4 cycle latency. To hide the latency, factor in the pipeline and it's spectualive execution design.

Per instruction benchmarks doesn't show the whole picture in regards to overall performance i.e. use some proper application benchmarks.

....
This means that on the x86 you need to work constantly with variables on the stack. This limits the overall performance of the x86 quite a lot. All INTEL chips can at best do 1 stack operation per clock. This means as they often have to work on the stack your average instructions per clock goes down to 1.x.
That the x86 has to work with the stack constantly makes it very hard for the x86 to effective use more ALUs to increase performance

As for X86's stack arch issue, AMD K10 includes Sideband Stack Optimizer hardware while Intel Core includes Stack Pointer Tracker hardware.

From http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-k10_5.html

"Sideband Stack Optimizer unit tracks the stack status changes and modifies the instructions chain into an independent one by adjusting the stack offset for each instruction and placing sync-MOP operations (top of the stack synchronization) in front of the instructions that work directly with the stack register. This way instructions working directly with the stack can be reordered without any limitations"
--
This amounts to JIT(Just-In-Time) optimizer on hardware.

On Intel Core i3/i5/i7

Stack Pointer Tracking (SPT) implements the Stack Pointer Register (RSP) update logic of instructions which manipulate the program stack (PUSH, POP, CALL, LEAVE and RET) within the IDU. These macro-instructions were implemented by several micro-ops in previous architectures.

The benefits with SPT include using
+ a single micro-op for these instructions improves decoder bandwidth,
+ execution resources are conserved since RSP updates do not compete for them,
+ parallelism in the execution engine is improved since the implicit serial dependencies have already been taken care of,
+ power efficiency improves since RSP updates are carried out by a small hardware unit

---
http://www.chip-architect.com/news/2001_10_02_Hammer_microarchitecture.html

"This is for instance the case in the ESP Look Ahead Unit that allows among other things that consecutive PUSHes and POPs to and  from the stack can be executed simultaneously"

PS; 2001 block diagram resembles AMD Bulldozer block diagram.

[Karlos]

Let's look at some 68k code to see what is so great about the 68k. Let's take a simple 68k memory copy with size (longwords) in d0...

.loop:
move.l (a0)+,(a1)+
subq.l #1,d0
bcc.b .loop

Let's say we don't know the alignment of the data either. This copies 1 longword/cycle with data aligned and is 6 bytes. If data is unaligned this is still pretty good. Now write that on PPC with anywhere near the performance. Don't let the old outdated 68060 with tiny little cache and only 4 bytes of instruction fetch/cycle DESTROY. I'll even give you a few hints. You better align the data first or the performance is really bad. You will need twice as many instructions to duplicate what's above. You will need to use an unrolled loop (wasting more code) and preload the cache. If you do all that optimally, you are still likely slower than the 68060 . No wonder PPC needs all those GHz.

This example isn't really good at anything other than demonstrating the 68K is forgiving of lazy programmers. The alignment is never an unknown property; all you need to do is test the least significant bit(s) of the source and destination operands. You can also test the count and build a nice duff's device loop in assembler and only handle the trailing bytes before and after. On the 060, you might even be able to use move16, under the right circumstances; even when source and destination is not 16-byte aligned, you can often read (or write) via a temporary cache line in an appropriately aligned bit of stack.

In short, when implemented properly on the 68K or PPC, this will almost always be significantly faster than the lazy code above.

[persia]

They should be able to hit 150 MHz about the time dual core 2 GHz tablets start appearing....

Sometimes the tortoise loses.

[amiga92570]

I don't understand people that say Amiga is about custom processors working together. That is what the amiga was but, that is the only way they could do it much like the c64, atari. They did that because they did not have off the shelf components that could achieve the performance they desired. Now you can get a processor with fpu, mmu, gpu, integrated that would blow them away. I think amiga if ported to x86 on modern hardware much like windows, Mac, Linux may not take over the marketplace it could certainly be successful. People, especially younger users are always looking for new stuff. Apple changed to x86 because ppc was no longer a viable option. Hardware does not make you money anymore, Software sales drive hardware sales, and generate profits. Look at the console market, Microsoft, sony, nintendo, make most of there money on software and basically give the consoles away. Amiga should really concentrate on developing some software applications, games, etc for there OS if they want to be successfull.

[koaftder]

I'm happy with MorphOS on the mac and for x86 there's AROS, so I don't care either way. Next Amiga purchase will be a power mac and another MOS license. I'll use the machine until the wheels fall off and from having a bunch of mac PPC machines experience tells me that will be at least 10 years. I still have a working B&W G3 from '99 that's still kicking along. PPC Mac gear was built to last. I'm sure the MOS team will find a way to keep the ball rolling before the mac gear becomes useless.