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Originally Posted by IanP
PiStorm seems to be in the wrong section of that spreadsheet. It's in the FPGA section when it should be in the 68K software emulation section. The CPLD or FPGA on the various PiStorm boards are only there to interface between the SMI bus of the Raspberry PI and the 68K bus/control signals.
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I partially agree with that. Although the Pi looks like hardware to the Amiga motherboard, it acts like an emulator. With JIT it is quite unpredictable. Some programs are sped up incredibly, others not so much. Lightwave probably loves it because it is very heavy on floating point, which the JIT can easily convert to native ARM instructions.
Two things that I find interesting:-
1. The big difference between the Pi 3B at 1.4GHz and the Pi 4B at 2.2GHz (2.4 x faster from only 1.6 x higher clock frequency). Looks like a Pi 4 is the way to go if you want ludicrous speed!
2. The Icedrake is the fastest of all the 68k hardware solutions, beating a 100MHz 060. That puts it close to what we might have expected from the 060 if Motorola hadn't thrown in the towel early.
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The ARM SoC on the PI is running the 68K CPU JIT emulation (Emu68) and may be using other hardware resources on the PI that could help a lot with bottlenecks.
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One could argue that it doesn't matter how it does it, so long as it looks like a 68k CPU to the rest of the machine. But there comes a point where the speed alone makes it not an Amiga.
I am concerned about what effect this might have on the retro community. We already have 'Amiga' software being produced that needs at least an 060 simply because it's there (for a vanishing small number of users), and programmers who can't be bothered coding for less powerful machines. This is the PC way, not the Amiga way. I am more impressed by games for the A500 like Dread and Metro Siege, which show what stock hardware can do in the hands of talented programmers.