Individual Computers - New accelerator cards for A600 & A1200

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

I've used a 68030 with MMU for these photos. Before that, I had an EC030 isntalled, and for the very first time, it was a "real" EC030, meaning that "CPU fastrom" was executed and MMU shown in Sysinfo as "in use", but the rom speed in bustest remained the same. I remember rumors about EC030's being re-labelled by Motorola, and in reality, they still have an MMU. Seems like this myth is busted ;-)

Full 68030's with working MMU relabeled as an 68EC030 is probably a myth but some 68EC030's have borken MMU (Remarked full 68030 that didn't pass all tests? 68EC030 documentation says MMU instruction behavior is not defined, do not use)

I had Microbotics VXL30 68EC030 based A500 turbo board in 1990s (Unfortunately I sold it few years later. Which of course was stupid thing to do..)

Enforcer worked perfectly fine, all hits were reported correctly. No other program that required MMU worked, even simple ROM remapping software crashed instantly..

[Zetr0]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

Porting the SD-Ram controller was faster than expected. First performance results from the A600 board! Will do memory autoconfig sometime tomorrow.

WOW!!!

over 5.5 MIPS from a 25Mhz 030 on an A600

Another WOW is that everything (libs/sys) is in CHIP and thats a 16bit path its even more Amazing!!




Amongst this amazing result I must ask why the FPU would slow down the design?


talking about metrics for a moment I would be interested with the following

CHIP to FAST (MBytes per second)
FAST to CHIP (MBytes per second)

and I would also like to say what you have it pretty damn awesome!

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

WOW!!!

over 5.5 MIPS from a 25Mhz 030 on an A600

My old Apollo 630 was 6.49mips @33mhz so thats pretty sweet

[Pavel]

Originally Posted by marcfrick2112

Jens, If you can actually get these produced, you'll make a ton of ppl happy....

+1
My checkbook is already signed for both the A1200 & A600 cards..
Sure hope Christmas comes early this year

[Zetr0]

@Stevo

thats pretty damn good methinks for an ECS machine!!!

I calculated that Jens adapter @ 33Mhz will be about 7.2 - 7.5 MIPS

I also suspect that

@ 40 Mhz it will achieve around 8.9 MIPS
@ 50 Mhz it will achieve around 11.1 MIPS
@ 56 Mhz is will achieve around 12.5 MIPS

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

@Stevo

thats pretty damn good methinks for an ECS machine!!!

I calculated that Jens adapter @ 33Mhz will be about 7.2 - 7.5 MIPS

I also suspect that

@ 40 Mhz it will achieve around 8.9 MIPS
@ 50 Mhz it will achieve around 11.1 MIPS
@ 56 Mhz is will achieve around 12.5 MIPS

Yep I'm watching this project with much excitement.

A603 + Indi ECS + Jens 030 would be awesome

Has anyone asked, will it all fit? I know there were problems getting the Indi and Apollo 630 in the same machine.

[Schoenfeld]

You can't add up MIPS that way. Faster CPU speed always means more memory waitstates - I'd have to use faster memory chips, which is NOT the plan for the A600 board.

It may happen that the 25MHz version is faster than a 33MHz version, because I'd have to insert waitstates to meet all timing parameters. There's a good 20 parameters that you may violate if you carelessly change the clock speed.

The A600 accelerator is equipped with 133MHz memory chips. Since I run them in CL=2 mode, the max. frequency is 100MHz. Since I don't do NOP commands between "row open" and "access", the max. allowed frequency is down to 50MHz, which is exactly my "frontside speed". Half of that goes to the CPU. Although it may sound weird, the 50MHz clock rate is pushing the 133MHz memory chips to the limit.

Jens

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

Amongst this amazing result I must ask why the FPU would slow down the design?

I explained that in Post#33 - it's a very technical explanation. In layman's terms, imagine a room with just a few people: Noise level is low, and communication is easy. Then imagine a room with lots of people, where you always have a basic noise level. If a speaker wants to reach a person at the far end of the room, he has more problems to do that compared to the room with just a few persons. Essentially, the FPU would act like the "too many persons" on the data bus.

Jens

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

Has anyone asked, will it all fit? I know there were problems getting the Indi and Apollo 630 in the same machine.

Give me another two weeks until I can show the mechanical concept for the A600. I'm expecting all confirmations this afternoon and delivery of new prototype boards and the metal parts sometime late next week.

The plan is to have ACA630, A603, Indivision ECS and a harddrive-replacement properly fixed in a closed A600 case with an external df0: and no soldering required.

Jens

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

The plan is to have ACA630, A603, Indivision ECS and a harddrive-replacement properly fixed in a closed A600 case with an external df0: and no soldering required.

Jens

[kriz]

Thats really cool man !!!

[crabfists]

This is great news. Lovely to see people making hardware for Amiga in 2010.

How would this compare with a Blizzard 1230 Mk IV @ 50mhz? (The accelerator I currently have).

[alexh]

Someone over at Amiga.org wanted to know if these accelerators (or at least the A600 one) one will have a switchless backwards compatibility mode?

i.e. hold down left mouse (or something) during reset to revert to using 68000

I guess the FastRAM (or 8Mbytes of it) wouldn't be available?

[Paul_s]

Could Jens be the first Amiga tech guy to win the Nobel Peace Prize from Nato for these developments?

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by alexh

Someone over at Amiga.org wanted to know if these accelerators (or at least the A600 one) one will have a switchless backwards compatibility mode?

Both cards have the onboard processor "hardwired-disabled", and they both don't have any rom where such a software could be placed. Especially the A1200 should be OK with a permanent CPU upgrade. The only reason I'd see for a CPU downgrade would be incompatible/old software where patches for modern Amigas are still not available. Such software usually doesn't like the ECS Agnus of the 600 as well, so why bother?

Jens

[Omolungo]

Just a question: the A600 accelerator board can be used in a machine without A603 (with just another chip expansion) and the floppy installed inside the A600 case?

Or it will require necessarily the presence of A603?

[alexh]

Thanks for that info.

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

Such software usually doesn't like the ECS Agnus of the 600 as well, so why bother?

I find most stuff works fine with ECS Agnus. There are of course exceptions, but not as many as you'd think. The Agnus unfairly gets a bad reputation for incompatibility when actually the root cause is usually the A500+ / A600's Kickstart v2.0x which came out at about the same time. With a KS1.3 and FastRAM I found the vast majority of stuff runs fine.

@Omolungo

I'd imagine a yes. The A603 won't be a requirement, just an option.

[Omolungo]

In that case one board will be mine

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by alexh

I find most stuff works fine with ECS Agnus. There are of course exceptions, but not as many as you'd think. The Agnus unfairly gets a bad reputation for incompatibility when actually the root cause is usually the A500+ / A600's Kickstart v2.0x which came out at about the same time. With a KS1.3 and FastRAM I found the vast majority of stuff runs fine.

KS1.3 will disable the A600's fastmem, because I'm using Z3 autoconfig, which is only available in KS2.0 or higher. Under 1.3, fastmem will have to be added manually with Addmem.

With all the screws and mechanics that I'm thinking of for the 600, there will be no way of "quickly removing" the accel. I'll look into a hard-disable-switch for the ACA630, but can't promise anything at this point.

Originally Posted by alexh

I'd imagine a yes. The A603 won't be a requirement, just an option.

Confirmed. However, with all the extra heat in the A600 case, I like the idea of free space created by removing the disk drive and using the disk slot as an "exhaust" for a low-noise, low-speed fan. You might want to dig out your old external disk drive because I *may* make it a requirement to remove the internal one (depends on thermal tests).

Jens

[Omolungo]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

Confirmed. However, with all the extra heat in the A600 case, I like the idea of free space created by removing the disk drive and using the disk slot as an "exhaust" for a low-noise, low-speed fan. You might want to dig out your old external disk drive because I *may* make it a requirement to remove the internal one (depends on thermal tests).

Jens

I would like to keep my old good floppy drive inside the A600, an all in one machine

But we will see, for now I wish you a very good work