PPC motherboard A1222 "Tabor" revealed
Few info yet: http://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-...-00027-EN.html
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(If true...) Why oh why choose a CPU that will cause incompatibility problems and decreased performance in existing software? :nuts
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lol an incompatible fpu of all things. strange
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It makes you wonder what kind of design meeting they must have had to discuss this.
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The P1022 is a dual-core CPU. Even if you were to emulate all FPU commands in software, you'd have a spare core to do that, as OS4 is still a single-core OS.
Besides, it's not all-incompatible, but throws a few illegal instruction traps on commands not implemented (according to one of the developers I talked to last saturday). That's about the same as what the 060 CPU does for unimplemented commands of the earlier members of the 68k group. Would you make fun of those who designed with the 060 back then? Surely not. Jens |
Also, NetBSD features FPU emulation for BookE CPUs with SPE since 2012. NetBSD also originally required FPU. The emulation works 100%.
Surely, if ACube/A-ONE chose this particular CPU, they knew it is possible. |
possible perhaps, but it doesnt mean practicable. whether this is aeon or acube, they products usually contain design decisions andlimitations that couldnt be explained for years. that seems to continue.
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If its better than whats currently available and works, whats the problem?
I love the way the word "crippled" is used. Its a nice little board, for entry level. I agree with Jens, no one is moaning at the 060. Why did they design it the way they did. |
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instead look at coldfire accelerators that have been as much hyped at their time as the board in question. check for availability of ultimate ppc containing the very same processor. sure, problems can be solved, but it remains to be seen if the result is satisfactory enough for it to become viable product. according to repeated attempts the projects with the cpus in question did not reach practicable state. |
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the board here has been publicly presented while an amiga gathering, provoking expectations and discussion, you cannot now blame the public for it. you simply shouldnt have shown it off. there were much more interesting developments out there like apparently working natami board or sonnet warpos accelerator. we could now spend time talking of them instead. |
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Coldfire? That's a totally different story. There was only one person on it, and he chose to do what he could do a lot better: Stay within his core business (to deal with boats if I remember right). In other words: There was never any serious effort to use a Coldfire processor in the Amiga. That's "for good reason" in my opinion: While the Coldfire attempts to be binary-compatible, but behaves differently on *implemented* commands, the OS4 core team member I talked to claimed that implemented FPU commands work as they should, and unimplemented commands throw an exception. Although I haven't read any details in a datasheet, I trust Cosel Mincea on this: The P1022 may have an FPU with fewer commands, but it also provides the bits&pieces to work around that, just like the 68060 did. Quote:
Jens |
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what concerns ultimateppc, i doubt one throws the towel on a project which came so far and has been invested in that much, without a reason. personally i think the problem with ultimateppc was probably not even technical but conceptional one. the ppc part/bus practically being isolated from 68k/amiga side doesnt make much sense to me as an expansion. rather the ppc side should be designed as standalone, which is what we are witnessing now. thats much more reasonable so far, admittedly. Quote:
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1) integer instructions are more common than FPU instructions 2) ColdFire has a few conflicting encodings, instructions which set the CCR differently and the stack uses different alignment which is incompatible ColdFire requires pre-execution or on the fly patching of 68k executables. It looks like P1022 trapping of the standard PPC FPU instructions is straight forward but has much more overhead than trapping unimplemented 6888x instructions on the 68060. The P1022 FPU emulation would likely be adequate for light floating point use and a joke for heavy floating point use like using Blender. |
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Or comments that we somehow are acting against the community's best interests by pointing this out. The cure to the problem is easy, btw. Once these first 1000 boards are sold, design a board that supports a PPC with a standard fpu. The price increase would amount to about $10 in parts. I'm willing to wait AND pay a slight premium (which in this case could be really slight). |
Will see how it performs. But it surely looks nice and Trevor did said that 500-700€ sounds expensive. So hopefully it will be cheapest Amiga OS4 hardware ever.
If there is a need for two separate versions, it is not a problem IF two versions is not required. There is already altivec versions of programs. |
That price tag!
In this day and age, for something so niche? We amiga users must be pretty rich monetarily to even consider something at that cost. Fair play to them though, I hope they do well, you never know what will happen. |
That price indeed. Alsolutely bonkers.
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