Vampire emulation in WinUAE

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

It is not same thing. All those useless things are old, hardwired designs that don't mysteriously come back in modified form.

@Toni:

You're right!

I'm not a vampire fan; I agree with you when you said in some other post, that the vampire causes even more fragmentation in the amiga scene.

[coder76]

The Amiga as a hardware platform needs modernization; PPC-Amigas are incompatible with old 680x0 CPUs as well as with Amiga custom chips. So they are not Amigas. Vampire promises both a 680x0-compatible CPU and custom chip compatible hardware in the form of SAGA. See? Much better. It's still an incomplete design though- not worth any emulation until it matures more, if ever. Not sure if it is possible to emulate well though. AMMX is a natural evolution that brings more power for certain tasks, like video decoding, alpha blending, texture filtering, and also an improvement over Pentium MMX and PPC Altivec.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by coder76

AMMX is a natural evolution that brings more power for certain tasks, like video decoding, alpha blending, texture filtering, and also an improvement over Pentium MMX and PPC Altivec.

This is where we strongly disagree.

[coder76]

Originally Posted by meynaf

This is where we strongly disagree.

These first versions of Vampire boards do not yet contain an FPU, and so also do not contain the more advanced 128-bit SIMD float instructions (SSE) you probably want. For video decoding you only need integer-based AMMX instructions. Gunnar said these float SIMD instructions would occupy a lot of FPGA space needed for other stuff in these early releases. AMMX in integer form was cheap to implement, however.

When FPU support is added in the future to Vampire boards, I believe we also get these SSE-instructions, but it will take some time. This is off-topic anyway.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by coder76

The Amiga as a hardware platform needs modernization

No, it doesn't

[Toni Wilen]

Lets not make this usual Vampire arguments thread. (See the title)

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by coder76

These first versions of Vampire boards do not yet contain an FPU, and so also do not contain the more advanced 128-bit SIMD float instructions (SSE) you probably want. For video decoding you only need integer-based AMMX instructions. Gunnar said these float SIMD instructions would occupy a lot of FPGA space needed for other stuff in these early releases. AMMX in integer form was cheap to implement, however.

When FPU support is added in the future to Vampire boards, I believe we also get these SSE-instructions, but it will take some time. This is off-topic anyway.

For video decoding what we need is a GPU. Then instead of obsolete MPEG-1 this would bring H.264 to the party. No need for MMX or SSE.

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Lets not make this usual Vampire arguments thread. (See the title)

Why not ? It would then end up in a flame war and ultimately get closed by the moderation --> problem solved

[Gzegzolka]

Maybe in far future vampire emulation would be cool feature in winuae. I wonder how it would be possible to emulate hardware that actually emulate amiga accelerator board.
I would love to see it.

There is so much amiga models and technology related to it, plus lot of different people love their hardware that it would be impossible to say that only one direction of development is right and rest is bad without starting some fanboys flame wars.

[matthey]

Originally Posted by coder76

These first versions of Vampire boards do not yet contain an FPU, and so also do not contain the more advanced 128-bit SIMD float instructions (SSE) you probably want. For video decoding you only need integer-based AMMX instructions. Gunnar said these float SIMD instructions would occupy a lot of FPGA space needed for other stuff in these early releases. AMMX in integer form was cheap to implement, however.

When FPU support is added in the future to Vampire boards, I believe we also get these SSE-instructions, but it will take some time. This is off-topic anyway.

The Apollo-core ISA practically can *not* upgrade the SIMD unit to 128 bit wide registers (integer unit registers become 128 bits wide) or floating point (integer unit registers contain integer and floating point). Instruction level compatibility of SSE is therefor not practical. It would be possible to add 64 bit versions of some SSE instructions to AMMX but the benefits of using existing SSE code would be reduced and the possibility of passing SSE instructions through to an x86_64 CPU in UAE after an encoding translation would be practically eliminated.

Was AMMX so cheap to implement that the 68k compatible FPU no longer fit in the Apollo-core? Will a future Apollo-core even contain a 68k compatible FPU or a new vector FPU (floating point SIMD unit) hyper-optimized for an FPGA? Will the Apollo-core ISA be supported when it only partially moves the 68k from 1994 (68060) to 1996 (Pentium MMX) and then is an obstacle to further development? Will the 68k and Amiga ever stop being a soap opera before all the developers leave?

[DamienD]

Hmmm, another useless thread that has been spoilt by people trying to sway others' opinions about the current "vampire" project status / direction...

At the end of the day; Toni has said that this is not an option and has given many valid points, numerous times, which personally I totally agree with.

This thread has most definitely outlived it's purpose; nothing more to discuss here; move along people...

Thread closed accordingly

...try asking the same question again in 5 years time if the "vampire" project ever delivers what people want / need and is stable / non-changing enough to actually warrant a possible WinUAE addition.