[Promilus]

Originally Posted by manossg

My point is exactly that these features do not exist in classic Amigas, so beefy Amigas, RPis and WinUAE cannot (yet) do what can be done with a Vampire.

Conversely Vampire cannot do many things PPC amiga or WinUAE can. Also - it's not that software emulated 68k can't do AMMX. Reason why nobody implements it to WinUAE and Musashi is becase no one wants to. There's just no immediate need to do that (and most likely won't be since there aren't many apps which absolutely will require it ... and WinUAE with JIT can do circles around super Vampire anyway)

Furthermore, you still haven't answered me about the price but shifted the goalpost to PPC. Ok, let's chat about PPCs (which cannot run Vamp software but can the Vamp run PPC software?).

Vamp can't run PPC either. It wouldn't be even possible to squeeze small ppc softcore to run on cyclone V A5 concurrently with AC68080. And there's absolutely no option to attach external PPC to it. You're talking about cost - well PiStorm is a fraction of what Vampire costs. FPGA itself is roughly the cost of entire Raspberry Pi 4! PPC aren't produced anymore en masse, just few specialized solutions which costs a lot. X5000 anyone? Yeah - that's that. But that's the fastest "amiga" there is. Well, maybe fairly modern PC costing around V4SA is faster with 060 JIT.

Also, I do not care for OS4 or MOS, unfortunately they seem like dead ends to me and not very NG (although they had so much potential), so please do not divert the conversation.

Well 68k is a dead end since mid 90s. Oh wait... Vampire is 68k compatible and that's it's selling point. Dead end technology Guess what, those NG dead ends can do more than ApolloOS. And does support more hw from different vendors as well. MOS handles PowerMacs which you can buy for 100-200$, sure second hand (or third ) but there's distinct possibility you could run Jedi Knight there and maybe watch some fullscreen video with decent speed.

Those MIPS and FLOPS numbers of AC68080 are ridiculous when you compare them with seasoned PPC and ARM (even Cortex M7 in STM32H7 guys from CSLabs used has more MIPS! and all it does is to handle temperature readings, fan control, frequency control, usb hid and mass storage support, sdcard support, firmware update and mp3 decoding, Cortex A53 from Pi3 is way more advanced than M7 and runs at higher speed too).

Gunnar always tries to shift attention to memory subsystem performance. Yes it is impressive. After all that's DDR3 memory (despite running at fraction of it's speed) while most platforms he compares it with are running SDR or DDR1.

So all Vampire represents is being performance king of 68k dead end and all vampire developers will achieve is to push that wall few bricks further then stop with no way to push forward and no way to turn back and try something else (and that's exactly why it is a trap).


@YouKnowWho

Apple resisted with PPC after 68K, but eventually even they went to Intel also. Today they are on ARM

Apple went smoothly to PPC offering decent emulation for old software. They went to x86 bandwagon only because IBM didn't provide new PPC which could be put into notebooks while intel had such CPUs. So they jumped in and were happy about it. Offered yet another emulation layer to play with PPC apps under x86. Apple invested in developing ARM architecture to their smartphones but wouldn't switch to it with notebooks and desktop hadn't intel fail they expectations just like IBM. Apple can produce more chips with TSMC 5nm, more power efficient and not terribly lagging behind in terms of performance. That's the reason why it was yet another time to switch. And also there's emulation. Amiga users aren't like Apple users. They want the old one OS, compatible with old ones hw but some of them want modern speed and features as well. That can't be done. Vampire offers something in between - fairly modern architecture, most compatible and powerful 68k but still fitting to classic amiga. Something more compatible? Turbo on Motorola. Something faster? WinUAE, PPC or ARM.