Motorola 68060 FPGA replacement module (idea)

[wawrzon]

Maybe "amiga hardware designs" should be a new subforum of the hardware discussion forum.

remember you will not get people like jens shoenfeld contributung to threads on this site. also the likes of toni wilen might help. if not amiga-coding.de then eab might be better place for brainstorming.

[freqmax]

If not Amiga coding then what?

What makes EAB better?

[wawrzon]

Sorry for throwing yet another diversion into the thread.

I don't think the PCI to Amiga warrants a separate thread unless someone makes tangible progress.

It's probably just an option for cpuXtoAmiga like FPGA 060 replacement is a subset of 680x0 accelerator.

pci2amiga, (one could distinguish a4000 030bus, zorro and a1000/500 expansion bus as slave) could be not neccessary with self made fpga board but might be a relief connecting any prefabricated device as master that would usually provide such an interface. having that interface technically working the other part would be to make the cpu of the host device take advantage of the interface. like 68k emulation on x86 to access the amiga chipset via pci.

im just trying to figure out how to modularize the project in order to divide it in a smaller easier doable parts dedicated to particular talents the contributors may have.

[Plaz]

He asked for references to retrain his brain since he hadn't used VHDL in so long... So book links seemed appropriate.

Yes thanks. It's the type info I was after. It's so long ago I'm not sure Verilog was even an option back when I dabbled in VHDL. I'd need to see some verilog too, but figured I'd start in familiar territory.


Edit: Looks like they were born within a couple years of each other, but IEEE standard for VDHL ~1987 and IEEE for Verilog ~1993. My small experience falls around that 87-88 time.

Plaz

[psxphill]

It's not a time sink if people are working together in parallel which is the way it was suppose to be when I started documenting the new 68k ISA. It's not a time sink if the new ISA attracts interest from outside of the retro crowd. It's not a time sink if the ISA is implemented and found to be a substantial improvement in power, code density, compiler support and ease of programming. You give up very little with the possibility to gain much more. There is a market for retro computing but a bigger market for a processor that can handle today's processing needs quickly with compact code as well as being compatible with old code.

You're very optimistic.
 
It's difficult to predict the future, but I can't imagine there is anyone outside of the retro community that will ever have any interest in a 680x0 cpu core. There are far too many other SOC/ASIC/FPGA solutions that have already carved up the market. There is no competitive edge against any of the other alternatives and nobody in business will care if they can run 680x0 code.
 
The majority of people want something that can run existing software and use existing compilers, adding instructions will cause market fragmentation if anyone is tempted to ever use them. A product that doesn't ship because the people behind it gets delusions of grandeur is no use to anybody.
 
Chasing rainbows is all well and good, but it's the reason that Natami failed. I'd rather see something ship for once.

[Heiroglyph]

I'd rather see something ship for once.

+1

[billt]

You're very optimistic.
 
It's difficult to predict the future, but I can't imagine there is anyone outside of the retro community that will ever have any interest in a 680x0 cpu core.

That's good enough for me to waste my time on something. Heck, if I had the free time, I'd make an OS4-able PowerPC laptop just for myself. Yes, time is a problem.

[matthey]

You're very optimistic.

Optimistic? Yes! Waste of time? Maybe. At least I can say I tried even if I'm dreaming a little. Reality is only one visionary person with a wad of cash away 8-).
 

It's difficult to predict the future, but I can't imagine there is anyone outside of the retro community that will ever have any interest in a 680x0 cpu core. There are far too many other SOC/ASIC/FPGA solutions that have already carved up the market. There is no competitive edge against any of the other alternatives and nobody in business will care if they can run 680x0 code.

No Edge? How about the best ease of use and code density in the industry. There is the FIDO, ColdFire and CPU32 but they were all cut down from the 68k instead of enhanced. ARM with Thumb 2 has moved close to what an enhanced 68k would be and it doesn't have any trouble selling. I think we would be a little more powerful and easier to use while Thumb 2 is a little more power efficient.

The majority of people want something that can run existing software and use existing compilers, adding instructions will cause market fragmentation if anyone is tempted to ever use them. A product that doesn't ship because the people behind it gets delusions of grandeur is no use to anybody.

You are correct that the 68k is behind in development software. We tried to add instructions that would be easy for existing compilers to support. This includes common instructions on other platforms and ColdFire instructions that could be enabled in the compiler. Also, an optimizing assembler (like Frank Wille's vasm) could do a lot of optimizations without even changing the compiler.

Chasing rainbows is all well and good, but it's the reason that Natami failed. I'd rather see something ship for once.

I'd like to see more Amiga products ship as well. They should ship with the most usable debugged 68020 core first but an fpga can be modified. The people that want a 68020 only core can stay with that and those who want to try something enhanced could also.

[freqmax]

im just trying to figure out how to modularize the project in order to divide it in a smaller easier doable parts dedicated to particular talents the contributors may have.

FPGA + 68060 socket.. DONE!

Where's the bus?


As for the embedded market. When people used to m68k continue to use it in work projects it may continue to exist. There's quite a lot of people used to it. It's nice to deal with which is one of the big values. And there's a lot of existing control system software.

[AJCopland]

Optimistic? Yes! Waste of time? Maybe. At least I can say I tried even if I'm dreaming a little. Reality is only one visionary person with a wad of cash away 8-).

This is the best argument I've heard for anything. If you want to see a particular thing happen then you have to try and make it happen rather than sitting around hoping for it.

I don't know about a 68060 FPGA replacement module. More useful for a lot of A1200 owners, one of the larger active groups of owners it seems, would just be an FPGA based trap door board with whatever core they wanted available from micro-SD card for easy upgrading/swapping.

KickStart(er) get that designed, and get it on KickStarter to see how much you can raise.

I do think however that all of this is a little moot given that MikeJ has his FPGAArcade well under way now

[freqmax]

The builtin CPU core in the FPGA Arcade is limited because of logic matrix constraints.

[psxphill]

ARM with Thumb 2 has moved close to what an enhanced 68k would be and it doesn't have any trouble selling. I think we would be a little more powerful and easier to use while Thumb 2 is a little more power efficient.

You can't dislodge ARM, even Intel will struggle taking them on.
 
Dreaming that you can, when you can't even duplicate what Motorola was doing twenty years ago, is just going to dislodge you from achieving anything.
 
If you look at the history of AROS, you'll see there were similar problems with the AmigOS project that preceded it:
 
"Several small groups' of Amiga users on the internet coordinated their efforts to create an open-source Amiga operating system that was not controlled by a incompetent, restrictive parent company. The most popular of these was the AmigOS project, which gained brief attention in Amiga User International during 1994. However, bitter flame wars on the feasibility of such an OS tore the project apart and the dream of an open-source Amiga OS disappeared.
 
During the fourth quarter of 1995, Aaron Digulla attempted to get the project moving again, by sending an RFC (Request For Comment) to the AmigOS mailing list. He suggested that a minimum specification list should be defined, allowing the creation of a basic open source OS. Once this stage had been completed, the group could decide if multi-processing, resource tracking, and other features missing from the official AmigaOS, could be implemented. After some discussion it was decided that the group should create a portable version of OS3.1. The Amiga Replacement Operating System was born..."
 
 
Only when they stopped arguing about how to do memory protection etc and just focus on OS3.1 compatibility did the project even start to take shape.
 
Natami still has a long way to go & it's going to be expensive. FPGA arcade has avoided a lot of the problems by only adding the bare minimum.
 
Also because mikej isn't trying to create his own computer platform, he doesn't have to try to control what is put into the FPGA. Natami on the other hand needed to lock out anyone from coming along who could write better VHDL.

[billt]

pci2amiga, (one could distinguish a4000 030bus, zorro and a1000/500 expansion bus as slave) could be not neccessary with self made fpga board but might be a relief connecting any prefabricated device as master that would usually provide such an interface. having that interface technically working the other part would be to make the cpu of the host device take advantage of the interface. like 68k emulation on x86 to access the amiga chipset via pci.

Sorry, misunderstod first time.

For PCI bridge, you may end up making a different bridge to each of those Amiga targets in order to have it optimized for each. There may be some similarities, but I'm not sure a single thing to fit all of them would be best.

[Plaz]

Natami on the other hand needed to lock out anyone from coming along who could write better VHDL.

This seems counter intuitive. Bit of a dig a Natami management I presume.

Plaz

[JimDrew]

The builtin CPU core in the FPGA Arcade is limited because of logic matrix constraints.

That's with the current core.  If Mike gets the microcode dump done and turns that into a table based core, that will shrink the size and make it very easy to change to higher speed FPGAs, not to mention tweaking the core for big caches, multiple pipelines, etc.

[psxphill]

This seems counter intuitive. Bit of a dig a Natami management I presume.

I was just highlighting the difference between how the FPGA arcade and Natami projects are being run.
 
It's not a dig and they are both within their rights to do whatever they want and however they want. As soon as I saw the debates about what instructions to add to the N68070, I knew it was doomed.
 
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