XMOS chips and the FPGA Arcade Replay

[freqmax]

This is the thread for stuff that as a minimum can be reprogrammed at will....

[ferrellsl]

This is the thread for stuff that as a minimum can be reprogrammed at will....

Hmm.....as opposed to unwillingly programmed?

These chips are programmable.....but only once....hence the discussion to use a chip socket when you want/need to update your device.....This same concept is used to update classic Amigas with updated Kickstarts.  So what's the problem?

[ChaosLord]

Kickstart ROM chips are slow, expensive and difficult to update.

We want machines that are fast, cheap and easy to update.

The whole point of an FPGA chip is that you can keep reprogramming it over and over and over again for free.  The XMOS chip is the exact opposite philosophy.

[psxphill]

Hmm.....as opposed to unwillingly programmed?
 
These chips are programmable.....but only once....hence the discussion to use a chip socket when you want/need to update your device.....This same concept is used to update classic Amigas with updated Kickstarts. So what's the problem?

The 4 core version has 64k of ram and 28 i/o pins, it wouldn't even be able to emulate a c64. The most expensive one ($27.11) has 256k ram & 256 i/o pins, which is starting to get better. I don't know if you can run code from ram, but it only has 32k of otp rom. I'm not convinced you could emulate a c64 on that either but I don't mind being proved wrong.
 
Feel free to discuss it somewhere else, but if all you're going to do is drool over it and not actually try building something with it then you're just wasting your time. It has absolutely nothing to do with the FPGA replay & cannot possibly emulate an Amiga.

[ferrellsl]

Kickstart ROM chips are slow, expensive and difficult to update.

We want machines that are fast, cheap and easy to update.

The whole point of an FPGA chip is that you can keep reprogramming it over and over and over again for free.  The XMOS chip is the exact opposite philosophy.

Why do insist on reading things into what I wrote that simply don't exist?  I never implied nor stated that Kickstart ROMs were fast.  Do you have a reading disability or are you just looking to be difficult?

[ferrellsl]

The 4 core version has 64k of ram and 28 i/o pins, it wouldn't even be able to emulate a c64. The most expensive one ($27.11) has 256k ram & 256 i/o pins, which is starting to get better. I don't know if you can run code from ram, but it only has 32k of otp rom. I'm not convinced you could emulate a c64 on that either but I don't mind being proved wrong.
 
Feel free to discuss it somewhere else, but if all you're going to do is drool over it and not actually try building something with it then you're just wasting your time. It has absolutely nothing to do with the FPGA replay & cannot possibly emulate an Amiga.

Who is drooling?  I just stated that if people wanted to consider using an inexpensive but fast, write-once programmable chip that they should consider using a socket.  I never mentioned C64s, pins or anything else.  You're as bad as ChaosLord when it comes to making assumptions and being difficult!  That's one of the reasons why I rarely post here because guys like you and ChaosLord have turned this board into a digital freak-show that you use to bully and push other people around to satisfy your massive cases of overgrown ego.

[psxphill]

Who is drooling? I just stated that if people wanted to consider using an inexpensive but fast, write-once programmable chip that they should consider using a socket. I never mentioned C64s, pins or anything else. You're as bad as ChaosLord when it comes to making assumptions and being difficult! That's one of the reasons why I rarely post here because guys like you and ChaosLord have turned this board into a digital freak-show that you use to bully and push other people around to satisfy your massive cases of overgrown ego.

My point was that it's pointless to use it in any way with an FPGA Arcade, the original thread was purely about the FPGA Arcade and this thread implies discussion about it's use with the FPGA arcade. Other people had mentioned using it for emulation, you incorrectly assumed that this part of my post was directed at you.
 
You would only use one of those in mass produced equipment where you wouldn't need to do an update. It's a pretty unexciting chip, I'd rather pay the extra and get a chip that could run different software without throwing it away. By the time you've run 100 different programs on it, the chip has worked out very expensive.

[ChaosLord]

Why do insist on reading things into what I wrote that simply don't exist?  I never implied nor stated that Kickstart ROMs were fast.  Do you have a reading disability or are you just looking to be difficult?

I wasn't being rude.  I am not making statements for you.

It seemed like you were not understand the really severe limitations of that chip and other posters were not getting thru to you.  So I simply tried to explain the problem from a totally completely different angle using different words.

I hereby solemnly attest, before the gathered witnesses of Amiga.org that ferrelsi did not imply or state that Kickstart ROMS were fast.


But you did seem to imply that because Kicstart ROMS can't be rewritten after having been burned and that since some Amigas have Kickstart ROMS that therefore chips which can't be reprogrammed are totally completely acceptable.

Kickstart ROMS are ok.  They have a certain level of barely being acceptable.  But Kickstart ROMS have a huge number of disadvantages.

In the A1000 days ppl got the idea that a Kickstart ROM would be wonderful and awesome because then ppl would not have to load kickstart off a floppy into RAM.  But that notion was only correct back in they days before cheap hard drives and cheap hard drive controllers.

In 1990 I bought an Amiga 3000 brand new.  And Thank Commodore it didn't come with a Kickstart ROM!  The Kickstart was a file in DEVS:  It could be easily expanded, modified, changed, patched and updated without having to buy expensive ROM chips!  That Amiga 3000 is so awesome!  The next year I bought another brand new A3000 and that one sadly came with a real Kickstart ROM and no way (that I know of) to load the kickstart from hard drive.  Years later my dad wanted to buy one of my A3000s: No way was I selling him my A3000 that had no Kickstart ROM.  I sold him the crappy one with the Kickstart 3.0 ROM chip.  Yuck.  The first thing he had to do was buy a Kickstart 3.1 ROM chip for $50.00.  $50.00 of the Earth's resources were senselessly destroyed by the use of this silly OTP (One-Time-Programmable) technology.   I don't want to destroy the Earth using primitive technology when there exists a better way to do things.

On My 1200T/060 I hafta copy the silly lame Kickstart ROM into proper FastRam so I can get a nice speedboost.

[mongo]

No way was I selling him my A3000 that had no Kickstart ROM. I sold him the crappy one with the Kickstart 3.0 ROM chip. Yuck. The first thing he had to do was buy a Kickstart 3.1 ROM chip for $50.00.  $50.00 of the Earth's resources were senselessly destroyed by the use of this silly OTP (One-Time-Programmable) technology.   I don't want to destroy the Earth using primitive technology when there exists a better way to do things.

Commodore used mask ROMs not OTP. They cost far less than $50 to make and used less of the Earth's resources than the equivalent amount of RAM would have.

Also, there was no 3.0 for the A3000, and your A3000 had a 1.4 Kickstart ROM in it.

[ChaosLord]

Commodore used mask ROMs not OTP. They cost far less than $50 to make

Nobody cares how much it cost to make them.  They also have to be ordered by the customer and the customer must pay a profit and the customer must pay for shipping for all these new ROM chips every 2 years.  So yes the cost of stupid ROMS is massively more than just using some RAM and downloading a file.

And yes around $50.00 is what my dad paid to the computer store for his 3.1 ROMS many years ago.

 and used less of the Earth's resources than the equivalent amount of RAM would have.

You have completely missed the point.

The ROMS cost massively more than the equivalent RAM in money, time and natural resources.

First you start with a 2.04 KS
which then had to be upgraded to 2.1
which then had to be upgraded to 3.0
which then had to be upgraded to 3.1
which then had to be upgraded to 3.1 with patches
which then had to be upgraded to 3.1 with even more patches
which then had to be upgrade to 3.1 with newer patches
which then had to be upgraded to 3.1 with still yet newer patches.  Remember there have been countless upgrades to the AmigaOS ROM since 1990.

8 separate ROMS costs a lot more than 512K or 1MB of RAM.

Just the shipping alone to order 8 separate ROMS might be enough to buy the RAM.

And if you live in any random left-wing country (lets use Britain as an example) then you hafta pay a whopping ridiculous 17.5% sales tax on all 8 of those purchases which means you have to destroy and burn more of the Earth's resources just to pay the tax.  (In fairness my Dad paid 0% sales tax for all his Amiga gear as ripoff sales taxes were illegal in the USA in those days.)

The moral of the story is that Write-Once technologies have their uses but they have many disadvantages.  Better to use Write-Infinite if the cost is close to the same.

Also, there was no 3.0 for the A3000, and your A3000 had a 1.4 Kickstart ROM in it.

I have a 3.0 for my A3000 so you are mistaken.  Maybe you are thinking about Kickstart 2.04 which I also have.

[JimDrew]

The 4 core version has 64k of ram and 28 i/o pins, it wouldn't even be able to emulate a c64.

That's not true.  There are already a few microcontroller based C64 emulations.  The specs for this chip with its 4 cores could easily emulate the C64 if you added some external RAM.

[takemehomegrandma]

The XMOS chip doesn't address external memory, it just has I/O ports.  That makes it nearly worthless for emulation purposes.

And isn't I/O the whole purpose of the XMOS chips?

That's not true.  There are already a few microcontroller based C64 emulations.  The specs for this chip with its 4 cores could easily emulate the C64 if you added some external RAM.

But if you can't then it's pointless, use the XMOS for I/O in some other product where it might make sense, and and use the Turbo Chameleon 64 for emulation and other stuff!



Read about it here, or at the Syntiac Pages

I think this product is über-cool, use it as a super cartridge in a real C64 to add tons of new features or use it as a stand-alone computer! When using at as stand-alone, you can also load different cores to it, like spectrum and even Amiga, as shown in this video!

[youtube]J_W_XbklmIY[/youtube]

[ElPolloDiabl]

Are these the 'planned' or 'might be possible' type of features that would convince you to buy a product. If you are going to buy an Amiga One I would only consider the things it can do at release.

PowerPC has become even more niche and could even be killed off in the near future.
That's not to say your Amiga One won't be a valuable collectors item.

[psxphill]

That's not true. There are already a few microcontroller based C64 emulations. The specs for this chip with its 4 cores could easily emulate the C64 if you added some external RAM.

I wouldn't have thought there would be enough I/O pins for ram after you've added joysticks, keyboard, display, sound & some storage. Unless you used serial for everything and added a bunch of custom external glue. This defeats the point as the cost starts going up & then you might as well use one of their more expensive chips.
 
I would guess they do development versions of these, even if it's a OTP loader and you test you code running from ram. Some older OTP chips were internally just eproms but with no erase window, if that is the case here then development ones might just come with a window. There is no way anyone would be able to do anything with them if you have to throw a chip every time you make a change. Development versions will be more expensive though.

[AJCopland]

My point was that it's pointless to use it in any way with an FPGA Arcade, the original thread was purely about the FPGA Arcade and this thread implies discussion about it's use with the FPGA arcade. Other people had mentioned using it for emulation, you incorrectly assumed that this part of my post was directed at you.

Actually my first thought was that it could be an interesting chip for us on something like the FPGAArcade with it's DSP like abilities, at least until I read that it can't be reprogrammed. I'd really like to see what could be done with it for flexible mesh vertex processing, image manipulation, MP3 / video encoding & decoding, audio effect processing, particle engines, physics simulation, etc.

With the limitation of being able to only program it once though it kind of becomes a moot point.

Is it a limitation of the chip or of that particular version of it? I mean are there versions that are programmable during operation? The small amount of on-chip ram is just a memory management a issue.

You're not going to emulate anything with such a chip, you're just going to feed it data and retrieve results constantly. Stuff that you might not want to do on the FPGA itself as that would either be too slow, or take up too much space.

Andy

[mongo]

Nobody cares how much it cost to make them.  They also have to be ordered by the customer and the customer must pay a profit and the customer must pay for shipping for all these new ROM chips every 2 years.  So yes the cost of stupid ROMS is massively more than just using some RAM and downloading a file.
And yes around $50.00 is what my dad paid to the computer store for his 3.1 ROMS many years ago.

Costing $50 of your dad's money and "$50.00 of the Earth's resources were senselessly destroyed" are two very different things.

You have completely missed the point.

I'm not sure you had one. You just like to complain.

The ROMS cost massively more than the equivalent RAM in money, time and natural resources.

No, they don't. You have no idea how expensive RAM used to be.

First you start with a 2.04 KS
which then had to be upgraded to 2.1
which then had to be upgraded to 3.0
which then had to be upgraded to 3.1
which then had to be upgraded to 3.1 with patches
which then had to be upgraded to 3.1 with even more patches
which then had to be upgrade to 3.1 with newer patches
which then had to be upgraded to 3.1 with still yet newer patches.  Remember there have been countless upgrades to the AmigaOS ROM since 1990.

8 separate ROMS costs a lot more than 512K or 1MB of RAM.

Just the shipping alone to order 8 separate ROMS might be enough to buy the RAM.

Versions of Kickstart available for the A3000 : 1.4, 2.04, 3.1. That's all. There was no 2.1 for any Amiga and 3.0 was for AGA Amigas only, and no 3.1 with patches ROMs were ever released.

And if you live in any random left-wing country (lets use Britain as an example) then you hafta pay a whopping ridiculous 17.5% sales tax on all 8 of those purchases which means you have to destroy and burn more of the Earth's resources just to pay the tax.  (In fairness my Dad paid 0% sales tax for all his Amiga gear as ripoff sales taxes were illegal in the USA in those days.)

Sales taxes were never illegal in the USA.

The moral of the story is that Write-Once technologies have their uses but they have many disadvantages.  Better to use Write-Infinite if the cost is close to the same.

No, the moral of the story is you have no idea what you are talking about.

I have a 3.0 for my A3000 so you are mistaken.  Maybe you are thinking about Kickstart 2.04 which I also have.

Is that for your A3000 that "didn't come with a Kickstart ROM"?