English Amiga Board - View Single Post - What spec Amiga to match the Gameboy Advance?

VladR · 29 December 2020, 21:05

I only have a cell phone available right now, so I can't browse through the full MC68040.pdf, but from my limited understanding of 68040, it has a 6-stage pipeline and non-EC version has full FPU.

What's the pipeline architecture like on 040? Can you execute FP code in parallel with Integer ops?
I would assume that if that's even possible, that the FP execution units would consume quite a few stages of the 6 stages.

But, the idea is, that I would interleave the FP code with Integer code for the inner texturing loops.

While 040 would be busy fetching the texels and moving them around, the FP code would be computing the index into the current texture scanline (in parallel).

I'm doing something similar for one of the version of my flatshader on 080- the FP unit computes the line equation during scanline traversal, the Integer unit does the scanline fill.
And because the scanline traversal fits into FP registers, there are more registers available for the scanline fill, without having to access RAM for variables. Win:Win

Can 040 do the same parallelism between FP and Integer unit?

29 December 2020, 21:05	#41
VladR Registered User Join Date: Dec 2019 Location: North Dakota Posts: 741	I only have a cell phone available right now, so I can't browse through the full MC68040.pdf, but from my limited understanding of 68040, it has a 6-stage pipeline and non-EC version has full FPU. What's the pipeline architecture like on 040? Can you execute FP code in parallel with Integer ops? I would assume that if that's even possible, that the FP execution units would consume quite a few stages of the 6 stages. But, the idea is, that I would interleave the FP code with Integer code for the inner texturing loops. While 040 would be busy fetching the texels and moving them around, the FP code would be computing the index into the current texture scanline (in parallel). I'm doing something similar for one of the version of my flatshader on 080- the FP unit computes the line equation during scanline traversal, the Integer unit does the scanline fill. And because the scanline traversal fits into FP registers, there are more registers available for the scanline fill, without having to access RAM for variables. Win:Win Can 040 do the same parallelism between FP and Integer unit?