Opinion: PPC, 68080 and other

[Pyromania]

@mschulz

V4 is stand alone and an accelerator card for different models of Amiga and soon all. This is a compelling advantage of the V4 technology. I'm all for competition in the Amiga market though.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by mschulz

68040 compatible CPU with full FPU (64-bit precision), performance application dependant, up to 1.1 MIPS/MHz (i.e. about 2000 MIPS in case of 1.8GHz CM4 module)

That is not a full FPU. A full FPU requires 80 bits precision (or actually even 83 bits of precision, since it still needs a round bit, a guard bit and a sticky bit on top). 64 bit is double precision, but Motorola FPUs offer extended precision. You need extended precision for elementary math to be able to implement transcendent funcions such as sin() or exp() in double precision.


Is a full MMU included in emulation now?

Originally Posted by mschulz

Extra CPU instructions (Emu68 aims to implement what was defined for 680x0 and nothing more

Which instruction set? The 68020 added many instructions, some of which are so obscure that they were removed one generation later again (CALLM, for example). Some later processors added additional instructions or encoded instructions differently (PMOVE on a 68040 has a different encoding than on a 68030).

[mschulz]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

That is not a full FPU. A full FPU requires 80 bits precision (or actually even 83 bits of precision, since it still needs a round bit, a guard bit and a sticky bit on top). 64 bit is double precision, but Motorola FPUs offer extended precision. You need extended precision for elementary math to be able to implement transcendent funcions such as sin() or exp() in double precision.

Ok, then not full but 64-bit limited. All 68881/2 instructions implemented. So far I have noticed lack of 80bit precision on MacOS only, as it is most likely misusing extended precision to do 64-bit integer calculations in some GUI elements.

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Is a full MMU included in emulation now?

Not yet, but once done it will work as on 68040. I have plan how to do it nicely using AArch64 MMU, but I need to add some metadata for escaping from JIT-translated code in case of page fault. This is my showstopper at the moment and need a bit time to think about it.

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Which instruction set? The 68020 added many instructions, some of which are so obscure that they were removed one generation later again (CALLM, for example). Some later processors added additional instructions or encoded instructions differently (PMOVE on a 68040 has a different encoding than on a 68030).

From code perspective it is a full 68040 set. MMU supervisor instructions not yet there, as there is no MMU yet, MMU control registers are there but are inactive. In comparison to 68040 several new control registers are added (https://michalsc.github.io/Emu68/int...Registers.html)

[mschulz]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

@mschulz

V4 is stand alone and an accelerator card for different models of Amiga and soon all. This is a compelling advantage of the V4 technology. I'm all for competition in the Amiga market though.

Yeah, I know what V4SA is In early ApolloOS days (before it forked from AROS) I was even involved in it a little bit - I wrote first version of SAGA driver.

[Pyromania]

@mschulz

Cool, nice to know.

[ShK]

As a little extra trivia, before of ApolloOS times Jason McMullan wrote first saga-drivers (RTG + SD card) for Vampire back in FEB 2016 (Well the very first one was some mockups in assembly by Thor).

[Pollock]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

Same exact features are present in their Amiga accelerator cards.

http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=products

True, but I think the point was, the V4SA is a little box, the runs an Amiga inside, through both hardware and software emulation.

Why anyone bought a V4SA is beyond me, and yes people will say, "It's not really an emulator, it does things in hardware, closer to a real Amiga", and this is true, but it's not an Amiga. is it.

Anyone can build an "Amiga in a box" that is way quicker than a V4SA, and way cheaper, why not just run emulation on a little notebook or something, and, hook it up to a CRT for that full retro experience?

I have two A1200s, one with a V1200, and one with a TF1260, and i like using them both ..... because they are "real" Amigas.

The Vampire cards like the V500, V600 and V1200 etc. can be compared with other accelerators, but the V4SA doesn't even need a "real" Amiga to run, and therefore is proably beyond the scope of this discussion, in my opinion anyway.

[CCCP alert]

IBM's Xenon CPU for Xbox 360 was a thing of real beauty back in 2007/2008 and paired with ATI's Xenos GPU was a rude awakening for the Wintel DX10 gaming brigade. Exclusive to Microsoft of course, shame, a next gen platform for OS4 this would have been awesome back then. Ditto the cut down Win OS of the 360 is probably the best MS ever managed.

Today I have no idea how you could get back the "Amiga 1000 advantage", anything that rips current off the shelf solutions is exclusive, like PS5 APU by AMD that does 60fps HD raytracing in hardware (patent is an awesome bit of reading). Who is going to make a more powerful AND bloatware free OS than UNIX or Mac OS too? Android is utter garbage, as flaky as crash happy memory leaking win95 lol and that's a brand new top end quality branded TV

Sad that the king of computers should become a label on small time meaningless hardware in a time when something as revolutionary as the A1000 is so desperately needed to put the fun back into computing.

[pixie]

Originally Posted by Pollock

Anyone can build an "Amiga in a box" that is way quicker than a V4SA, and way cheaper, why not just run emulation on a little notebook or something, and, hook it up to a CRT for that full retro experience?

Hard timer? It's constancy? If emulation provides an 1:1 experience there's really no point but if time to time it breaks the immersion, it doesn't matter how long it takes, how many times it happens, it won't cut it

[Pyromania]

Does anybody know what happened to Dammy. He loved AROS for years, maybe too much in fact. He's been MIA for a few years now so UI was just wondering.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Today I have no idea how you could get back the "Amiga 1000 advantage"

Certainly not in raw performance be it in CPU power or GFX power.
That ship has long sailed.

But the good news is: it does not matter anymore.
At least not nearly the way it did.
A "decent performance" is often more than enough for most applications.
I would put that in the 1 Ghz category - meaning something that would be equivalent to an Apollo 68080 @ 1GHz would fulfill that demand - which at the same time excludes the current FPGA implementation.

In general:

Computing has become too complex for individual coders. This is now mitigated by layers upon layers of abstractions, which try to make the raw power of the hardware somehow accessible to the human mind. But this approach has severe speed penalties - and it also makes everything highly framework/system/language dependent. The access to the underlaying hardware is hidden and the understanding of the whole system is lacking.

And exactly that would be the opportunity for a new system. A system that puts coders and users back into control of the machine.

How would it look like?

Message passing and pseudo-registers.
Anything should be either a message or a write to some FIFO, ring buffer, virtual memory address. Just put the things you want to happen or the data to process on a queue/buffer and give the message handler the signal. The message handler (exo-kernel) then invoke the driver/gpu/other to deal with the instructions in that queue/buffer.

Anything that needs to be happening synchronously, because your task can not continue without the result, should be part of a vCPU, with an instruction set facilitate these needs. This incorporates all kinds of mathematical operations including vast matrix operations (that could be offloaded to the gpu on real hardware).

Anything that can be done asynchronously is done by sending data to a buffer, where a "device" takes care of it.

The goal would be the ease and joy of programming as well as the joy and comfort of using such a system. The things Amiga always has been.

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Certainly not in raw performance be it in CPU power or GFX power.
That ship has long sailed.

But the good news is: it does not matter anymore.
At least not nearly the way it did.
A "decent performance" is often more than enough....

I agree, on my TV with Android the volume controls take 2-3 seconds to appear and often the TV needs a full shutdown/restart so I can watch the Amstrad quality Android TV jerky animation, as laggy and crappy as Winbloatware IMO.

Never used Mac OS because identical Wintel laptop spec costs £600-800 more but a snappy efficient delightful OS that reminds me of the glory days would be enough to sell it to me even if it's just top end quad core ARM based. If I was a modern gamer I'd get a PS5 anyway (well the pro version in beta test I've seen now).

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

I agree, on my TV with Android the volume controls take 2-3 seconds to appear ...

There is a nice comparison how long it takes a single character to appear on screen on an Apple II and a modern PC. On the Apple II it is always on the next screen refresh ... 60 times a second. On a modern PC only very few editors manage to do so let alone Word ... and even in the best case this can not be guarantied - despite over thousand fold increase in raw processing power.

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-latency-...n-an-apple-ii/

(the Article wrongly claims the Apple II was released 1983, six years after its actual release in 1977. It probably meant to refer to the Apple IIe - but all claims are also true for the original Apple II)

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

A "decent performance" is often more than enough for most applications.
I would put that in the 1 Ghz category - meaning something that would be equivalent to an Apollo 68080 @ 1GHz would fulfill that demand

Most applications today are web applications. The only notable exception is games, but most of these are online now too. A web browser should satisfy over 90% of most people's personal computing needs, provided that it is fully compatible with the 'industry standard'. Games that run on the local machine are a smaller contributor, but perhaps significant to us. In this case compatibility of the machine itself is crucial.

So just having hardware with 'decent performance' won't cut it. Trying to do it with anything that could in any way be called an Amiga will be problematic. Nobody wants that, so why bother? Just use a PC and be happy.

Computing has become too complex for individual coders. This is now mitigated by layers upon layers of abstractions, which try to make the raw power of the hardware somehow accessible to the human mind. But this approach has severe speed penalties - and it also makes everything highly framework/system/language dependent. The access to the underlaying hardware is hidden and the understanding of the whole system is lacking.

All true. But that's the way it has to be.

To much is invested in the current ecosystem for any dramatic improvements to be made. Instead it will continue to become more complex and bloated, driving demand for even more powerful hardware. Eventually humans will be taken out of the loop. Chips will be designed by AI and programmed by AI. We will not be able to understand the code, and will just have to 'trust' that it's doing the job better than we can (which will almost certainly be true).

And exactly that would be the opportunity for a new system. A system that puts coders and users back into control of the machine.

A pointless exercise.

But hey! Life's pointless. If you can get some enjoyment out of what you do then it's all good...

How would it look like?

Message passing and pseudo-registers...

The goal would be the ease and joy of programming as well as the joy and comfort of using such a system. The things Amiga always has been.

I'm already getting that out of my Amigas. What you are proposing doesn't seem worth the hassle.