Terrible Fire Accelerators

[kgc210]

I haven't fully caught up with all your vids yet, but with the TF540 are you following the MC68040 Designers Handbook for now to place the 040 on top of the 020/030 bus? Or is there a more modern / simplified way of doing it?

The logic must be getting quite complex now having an 020/030 bus on top of the 68k and then putting an 040 on top of it all.

I guess it would be quite simple to start with say an A4000 card. Due to the CPU interface being basically an 030 interface. The A3630 is something you could almost wirewrap.

Do you think it would be quite possible to simply copy over your "RAM" CPLD onto an A3630 to add RAM to it, or does that CPLD rely on other parts of your BUS CPLD? Obviously it would be all stuck at 25mhz unless you made the 030 on the card run at a different speed to the Motherboard like with your TF52/30 etc.

[plasmab]

Sorry but I do videos and livestreams so I don't end up writing long explanations. With that said I have no interest in big box amiga cards. They are well catered for


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[kgc210]

Do you happen to know which vid covers the 030 to 040 conversion? So I can skip around.

[plasmab]

The TF540 videos will/have cover 040 bus operations. The bus operation is fundamentally different so a small CPLd does not cut it


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[plasmab]

I've not looked at the A3000 bus.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Mr.Flibble]

Originally Posted by plasmab

They are well catered for

That's actually not the case at all, the 3000/4000 cpu cards are all massively overpriced and in very limited numbers, it's one of the reasons I was so interested when you started porting the A3640 board into eagle.

I completely understand not looking at it much though, you've enough on your hands as it is

[plasmab]

Well the A3640 cards can be upgraded to 060 reasonably easily


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[trixster]

Correct, but the ram access speed of an 060 A3640 is roughly half that of a decent 060 accelerator card.

[fryguy]

Even the crappy A3640 is getting rather expensive now.

[plasmab]

Well.. right now I'm working on making SATA go. After that I'll make an 040 go. After that it's A1200/CD32 stuff.

The A4000 eats too much desk space IMHO but one day I'll take up the mantle there.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by plasmab

Well.. right now I'm working on making SATA go. After that I'll make an 040 go. After that it's A1200/CD32 stuff.

The A4000 eats too much desk space IMHO but one day I'll take up the mantle there.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Well the 500 : 18 11/16" x 2 7/16" x 13"
Amiga 4000 : 15" × 5" × 15 1⁄4"

And you can put a monitor on top of the A4000, though with LCD you can do that with an A500 as well if it had a slim base.

[NovaCoder]

Just out of interest and probably a completely crazy ass idea but is it theoretically possible to have multiple 030/040 processors on an Amiga accelerator card (maybe with an FPGA providing the magic) to get the multiple processors to share the workload and make it transparent to the Amiga OS?

I'm only asking because I remember reading ages ago that multiple 68k FPU's could share workload somehow.

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

Just out of interest and probably a completely crazy ass idea but is it theoretically possible to have multiple 030/040 processors on an Amiga accelerator card (maybe with an FPGA providing the magic) to get the multiple processors to share the workload and make it transparent to the Amiga OS?

I'm only asking because I remember reading ages ago that multiple 68k FPU's could share workload somehow.

If only there were some guy who could write software-say something like ScummVM, offload something like audio to a second processor.

Something I've found out recently, some 68k Macs had L2 cache I wonder if that can be done on an Amiga and whether it needs software support. So maybe someone should add that, to something.

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

If only there were some guy who could write software-say something like ScummVM, offload something like audio to a second processor.

You mean like by offloading music to a MIDI device for processing?

Not sure any guy around here would do something like that

Anyway, back on topic. Is a multiple 68k processor board theoretically possible and how hard would it be to make it happen? I'm just thinking that 040's are way cheaper than 060's.

[plasmab]

Probably possible but it's not something that interests me right now. I'm looking at putting an MP3 decoder on the FPGA with a sigma delta dac for sound output



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Toryglen-boy]

Originally Posted by plasmab

After that it's A1200/CD32 stuff.

yes! ya dancer.

[wawa]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

You mean like by offloading music to a MIDI device for processing?

im a noob here. but imho dedcated devics for a task can be had withou any computer at hand. thstas somewhat different to what amiga chipset was about.

Is a multiple 68k processor board theoretically possible and how hard would it be to make it happen?

might be possible with the apollo core, and aros. however while apollo team claims more cores can be put on a die alright, certain aros essential smp features had to be disabled on 68k for compatibility. may not be a final solution, and the perticular way os 68k towards multicore may still stand open. it needs some coop though.

[tom256]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

Just out of interest and probably a completely crazy ass idea but is it theoretically possible to have multiple 030/040 processors on an Amiga accelerator card (maybe with an FPGA providing the magic) to get the multiple processors to share the workload and make it transparent to the Amiga OS?

I'm only asking because I remember reading ages ago that multiple 68k FPU's could share workload somehow.

Possible but no support for multiprocessor in AmigaOS.

There was prototype card with 2xMC68030 from Commodore.

One CPU can support multiple FPUs (I think 8 was max).

http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.co...ct.aspx?id=224

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

If only there were some guy who could write software-say something like ScummVM, offload something like audio to a second processor.

Something I've found out recently, some 68k Macs had L2 cache I wonder if that can be done on an Amiga and whether it needs software support. So maybe someone should add that, to something.

There was dedicated chip for MC68030 to extend cache. Question is: will it benefit with modern fast RAM?

[AJCopland]

Originally Posted by tom256

There was dedicated chip for MC68030 to extend cache. Question is: will it benefit with modern fast RAM?

There were cache extending cards for the Mac that apparently got you anywhere from 20% to 30% performance benefits. (http://www.shobaffum.com/iici/upgrades.html).

Sadly I can't find any information about the 68030 and external caches.

[plasmab]

Originally Posted by tom256

Possible but no support for multiprocessor in AmigaOS.

There was prototype card with 2xMC68030 from Commodore.

One CPU can support multiple FPUs (I think 8 was max).

http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.co...ct.aspx?id=224



There was dedicated chip for MC68030 to extend cache. Question is: will it benefit with modern fast RAM?

Doubt that any external caches will beat the 12ns RAM on the TF530. Its faster than anything except the on chip cache.