ARM or x86 with FPGA emulator

[Romanujan]

If these laptops are 10 years old PPC Macs, then go back to post #66.

[jj]

If these laptops are 10 years old PPC Macs, then go back to post #66.

Ahhhh post #66 it's not very well thought out though is it really.....

[NorthWay]

The Power8 box, that I daily work on has 4 Terra byte main memory

You got a pre-release model? I can't remember the full 4 being an option on the released boxes?
I hope we can get our 822 up this or next week (it arrived while absolutely nothing happened in the summer and just about everyone was away - sucks to come in and start on first day after the vacation...)

[ElPolloDiabl]

You might like the FPGA arcade or other FPGA. You could get to a 200mhz 060 equivalent soon.

[fishy_fiz]

In regards to byte ordering, x86 can use either le or be. Granted for decade old stuff it comes at a performance hit, but even then you're left with more performance than ppc can offer. Newer gear even has instructions to do it in hardware.

I dont really care for any "versus" crap, but even more irritating is this communities obsession with recycling info. that years and years ago was partially true and running with it regardless of the truth.

[TeamBlackFox]

On the OP, this sounds like a dumb idea. As said, you're basically doing what Nintendo did with the SA-1 in the SNES game Super Mario RPG: Enhancing one part while leaving the rest untouched.

I really wish Commodore would have diversified the Amiga market. If they made a low cost server with a 68k and OCS combo chip around the time of 1992 then they'd have gotten a toe hold in the low cost server market, especially for people new to server administration. It may have not been super secure, but since Amiga in the 1990s was a poor man's SGI more or less, take a page from their book.

I would like to see the guys at A-EON do a small desktop version of the SGI Onyx2 cube design, and do something like this:

PowerPC or SPARC or MIPS quad core
DDR3 RAM up to 32GB
NUMA bus system

I'm a believer in keeping it simple and staying away from needlessly complex architectures. SPARC, for instance, is RISC, Big Endian and has open designs, plus Fujitsu manufactures tons of them for the server market. SPARC compares favorably to x86_64 if you compare similar die sizes and CPU classes. They're also a parallel orientated design which is where technology is going to move. Moore's law has been hit for clock speeds and the marketing behind that is slowly fading, but we can thank Intel and NetBurst for that, bunch of morons. So parallel, moderately clocked designs will become the norm. Even x86 is now becoming more RISC-like internally, converting the more orthogonal instructions to simpler ones with microcode.

68k was good for the time, where orthogonal instructions were useful, but today all this FPGA design effort is largely fruitless when the fact is the hobby of Amiga computers is going to die out. I like having Nia around, but usefulness is taking priority these days. Orthogonal instructions are largely useless waste of die space when MIPS for instance is simpler by a magnitude and is able to work with the fact that memory access is very fast now and we don't need to have very lengthy instructions fed to the CPU when it is faster now to do short concise instructions. Even Itanium and EDGE emphasize this with instruction parallelism, which while applying CISC concepts to RISC actually compliments the architecture to the point that one engineer I know described it as Super-RISC.

[fishy_fiz]

What is it you think Moore's law has to do with netburst exactly? Moore's law is based on performance, not clock rates. Additionally x86 has been risc like for many years. The multiple micro ops idea has been in practice for about a decade. Also, contrary to what you've suggested clock rates are becoming a focus again (not soley, but equally to core count). Devil's Canyon modifications support this, as does the fact you can buy x86 cpus whose stock frequencies are 5ghz. Why would A-eon make a board supporting 16* the memory the os its designed for?
No offense intended, but your post reads like something strung together by someone who's trying to sound more informed than they are. More holes than solid.

[KimmoK]

@fishy_fiz
"Why would A-eon make a board supporting 16* the memory the os its designed for?"

x86/x64 OS roots are from 640k system, so OS can evolve, better not limit the HW too much.

A-eon has but signifficant effort to Linux for their HW and also AOS is breaking the 2GB barrier. (IIRC, PA6T can already address 16 or 32GB, P5020 can address 64GB)

[psxphill]

x86/x64 OS roots are from 640k system, so OS can evolve, better not limit the HW too much.

What are you trying to say?

[ppcamiga1]

Once again, yet another idiot trying to convince us Amiga users to resign from the powerpc.

We Amiga users use powerpc because it is the fastest and COMPATIBLE solution.

Powerpc exists, it works, anyone can buy and use.

As in 1997, so 2014.

x86,ARM are cool but because it is low endian they are incompatible,
and therefore useless.

And as in 1997, in 2014 emulators on x86 is still slower than powerpc.
It is boring this whole %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@! "powerpc is evil".

Years of bull%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@! but with no effects, powerpc haters can only talk but they are too stupid and too lazy to do something.

Powerpc is the best solution in the same way 17 years ago and now.

And that's why we Amiga users will still use powerpc.

[biggun]

He has a point that there are no POWER-PC offering in the "user-price segment".
IBM does produce very good POWER chips for servers in the price segment of $20,000 and plus.
But there is a "hole" in the user segment.

You can go out and buy a good x86 Laptop today for $500
You can not get a PPC laptop.

Of course talking here about it will change nothing...



If you compare it with cars then
* IBM is selling FERRARIS
* AMIGA hardware are fast as a FIAT-PANDA but are sold with a price tag of a Ford Mustang.

Its understandable that users would prefer to pay either FIAT-PANDA prices for PANDA performance
or they want at least Mustang performance for the price the pay.

[OlafS3]

Once again, yet another idiot trying to convince us Amiga users to resign from the powerpc.

We Amiga users use powerpc because it is the fastest and COMPATIBLE solution.

Powerpc exists, it works, anyone can buy and use.

As in 1997, so 2014.

x86,ARM are cool but because it is low endian they are incompatible,
and therefore useless.

And as in 1997, in 2014 emulators on x86 is still slower than powerpc.
It is boring this whole %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@! "powerpc is evil".

Years of bull%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@! but with no effects, powerpc haters can only talk but they are too stupid and too lazy to do something.

Powerpc is the best solution in the same way 17 years ago and now.

And that's why we Amiga users will still use powerpc.

Lately it seems that AmigaOS supporters seem to prefer harsh words

People are not "hating" PowerPC, it more seems to me that some people take every critic or preference as personal attack

PowerPC is not a bad architecture but it has lost the race. Everything is about money, developing new processors is time consuming and expensive. Today money goes either in something Intel/AMD or ARM related so these both platforms develop, there is not much money going in PPC and because it is not used for desktops anymore there is no money going in processors that are capable, money goes in processors either for embedded systems or servers. It is simple economics, no market means no money to earn means no investment. Even PowerPC geeks cannot deny basic rules of economy. With existing options the market (1000+ user) can exist for a while, that is all. The platform will lag more and more behind, first class will be just the price. When you are happy with that it is ok, at the moment it is pure hobby market with no money to earn. If you want to change that PowerPC is the wrong choice.

[biggun]

PowerPC is not a bad architecture but it has lost the race.

Its very simple...
There are two main companies building POWER/PPC CPUs.
These are IBM and MOTOROLA aka FREESCALE.

IBM is _only_ interested in the high end server market.
Therefore they only produce high end servers.

Freescales PPC customers are telecom/router manufacturer.
So Freescale of focuses on producing chips which are ideally suited for there customers.


Doing a CPU development costs roughly about $50,000,000 USD.

Neither IBM nor Freescale have any customers using the PPC in the desktop / home -pc market segment. So taking a lot of money and building a CPU for no customers - makes really no sense to them.

The Antaris aka 970 aka G5 CPU was a desktop version of the IBM POWER-4 CPU.
Since then no desktop-CPU was build.
But IBM did continue to improve the POWER chips,
After POWER4 came POWER5, then POWER 6, then POWER 7, and now you can buy POWER 8.
So IBM did improve the POWER continuesly. And continues to do this.
But in the "user" segment you do not see this.

The same is with Freescale. Freescale continued to improve their PPC offering -
but in the market segment which their customers did demand.

[psxphill]

We Amiga users use powerpc because it is the fastest and COMPATIBLE solution.

A decent PowerPC emulator running on a top of the line x86 will be cheaper and faster than any Amiga hardware available.
 
 I'm not so convinced that ARM could do the same.
 
 For old school Amiga users who never used a PowerPC there is very little reason to be able to run PowerPC software.

[wawrzon]

Once again, yet another idiot trying to convince us Amiga users to resign from the powerpc.

We Amiga users use powerpc because it is the fastest and COMPATIBLE solution.

Powerpc exists, it works, anyone can buy and use.

As in 1997, so 2014.

x86,ARM are cool but because it is low endian they are incompatible,
and therefore useless.

And as in 1997, in 2014 emulators on x86 is still slower than powerpc.
It is boring this whole %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@! "powerpc is evil".

Years of bull%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@! but with no effects, powerpc haters can only talk but they are too stupid and too lazy to do something.

Powerpc is the best solution in the same way 17 years ago and now.

And that's why we Amiga users will still use powerpc.

actually amiga users use 68k cpu family, simply because there is no amigas with ppc, arm, mips or x86 cpus, but this might be too hard to comprehend, i fear.

[TeamBlackFox]

Actually Fiz I do know what I'm talking about.

I think AmigaOS 4's best chance of survival is not emulation or on x86, but on an open design based on the NUMA architecture ( Basically it is a decentralised DMA system which is widely copied, Intel uses QPI which takes a lot of the same ideas ) and I fully support breaking both API and ABI as well as architectural compatibility for a sustainable architecture. Both MIPS and SPARC have open designs, which means A-EON could improve them without a license.

The primary advantages of AmigaOS are that it is lightweight without being impractical, and that has nothing to do with its backwards compatibility. Instead, make the OS fully 64-bit and use FS-UAE as an integrated sandbox for old software, add a ports system like in BSD as well as a frontend to it, which will make software dependency and distribution easy, NUMA architecture would increase bus performance and make a CPU that isnt as fast be less of a hindrance. CPU frequency is pretty much BS when a 1GHZ R16000A MIPS CPU wipes the floor with a 3GHz Pentium 4, all higher frequency does is make more heat and power consumption.

The only reason I don't support ARM is that up until recently most designs have been 32-bit, which in today's world of cheap memory doesn't make sense. In addition most ARM CPUs are for mobile and embedded devices. I have a Nexus 7 tablet, I love it, but it isn't any better than my 600MHz Octane2 at computational tasks, however in memory access and graphics, there is no contest, but that is to be expected.