09 July 2024, 08:26 | #21 |
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I had a similar situation, I wanted to use an Amiga, but do not have the desk space to fit a real Amiga anymore due to moving to a smaller flat. Emulation was not something that I was interested in, the A500 Mini is nice but it does not feel quite like a real Amiga and the A600GS I am not sure about. However, I had been thinking for a long time about a Vampire V4 Standalone and now after over half a year I am happy I got one. It feels like a real Amiga but has awesome new features such as the SAGA and 16 BIT audio but it still feels very much like a real Amiga. The SD Card slot acts like a floppy disk and with ApolloBoot you can run all the various Workbench versions on one machine. Plus it is a tiny little box which helps if you are limited in space. Admittedly, it is not cheap, but you get a lot of Amiga for the price and improvements are constantly coming.
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09 July 2024, 09:01 | #22 | |||
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It's just another processor architecture that is, however, unlike PPC still available in quantities and for budget prices. However, there is no native AmigaOs port for it. It doesn't work any better or worse than the PPC, except that it is in active use. Quote:
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I don't know what "we" is supposed to mean, but different people want different things. There are plenty of choices. Thus, in particular, if you want a really cheap Amiga which is really fast, a software emulator is probably the easiest option - it's also more compatible than existing hardware emulations, certainly a lot more than the PPC Amigas, and faster than existing Amiga hardware. |
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09 July 2024, 15:37 | #23 |
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It's definitely true that emulation is the cheapest&fastest way to run a high end classic Amiga.
But a PiStorm32 with Pi4b/CM4 running at 2.2 Ghz you are already getting WinUAE like speed. It's safe to say that CPU performance is quite overkill already for most of the existing 68K software base. WHDload compatibility is extremely good as well, would say not better or worse than on WinUAE. Yeah it's an ARM processor underneath but who cares, you get a crazy fast A1200 and lots of goodies like DDR4 RAM, SD card up to 25MB/sec, RTG GFX, Wifi and soon FrameThrower for RGB pass through over HDMI. And not unimportant for an affordable price. Add support/drivers for 2D&3D acceleration and the hardware h264/h265 video decoder and you have a killer classic Amiga. |
09 July 2024, 21:45 | #24 |
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Motorola made 060 last of the classic 68k line long, long time ago. Anyone thinking that it's possible to get something quite like it today is delusional. So what options are there actually?
PowerPC? Not really, it was good idea back then, implementation not so good. Architecture is so far behind and basically only in niche industries which makes it extremely expensive for what it offers. FPGA? Sure, it is possible and that's exactly what you get with either Vampire or things like MiSTer (obviously V comes ahead with actual CPU performance due to much different softcore). Emulation on different CPU architecture whatsoever - this is relatively easy to implement and due to big popularity of either x86 or arm makes it pretty affordable as well. Someone doesn't like either of those architectures? Try your luck porting emu68 for RISC-V ... And if you have lots of money ... make your own damn 68k ASIC. It actually doesn't f matter what you choose. There won't be sudden revolution which will take Amiga on top and most likely there never will be great new Amiga "NG" platform as well. Just take whatever suits you the best and enjoy without ruining fun for other ppl. |
09 July 2024, 23:27 | #25 | |
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Would actually be interesting to see what sort of performance it would deliver at something like 1.5 GHz and also performance/W compared to lets say ARM chips typically found in Raspberry Pi etc. It would probably show up in accelerators for Amiga, Atari and even some Macs. It could even find usage in some consumer products etc, who knows. |
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10 July 2024, 01:29 | #26 | |
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The 68080 core doesn't include an 'emulation of the chipset', that's done separately in the V4 FPGA. You say it's a 'partial' emulation of a 68k CPU, but fail to mention that the 68020, 68030, 68040 and 68060 are only 'partial' implementations too. Doesn't have a (compatible) MMU? Neither does the 68020 (a separate chip is needed for that, and very few Amiga accelerator cards have one). Doesn't have a full FPU? Neither does any other 68k CPU. The 68020 and 68030 have none, and the 68040 and 68060 only partially implement the 68882. The 68060 is also missing some 68020 integer math instructions. Furthermore the instructions relating to CPU functions such as caching are not the same in all of them, so you need to code for the specific CPU in order to be fully compatible. In reality the 68080 core implements enough of every other 68k CPU used in the Amiga to run 99.9% of games and applications. It obviously doesn't work with utilities or system libraries that use specific features of a particular CPU, but neither do other 68k CPUs. EC and LC versions of 68k CPUs were also commonly used in machines 'back in the day' because they were cheaper, and still are today now that the original chips are getting rare and expensive. Unlike all those old Motorola 68k chips, the Apollo 68080 has the advantage that 'missing' features can easily be added at no cost to the user. The only issue I can see is that the designer (Gunnar) has his own ideas on what should be included in it. Maybe if people like you had a more positive attitude he might be more accommodating. |
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10 July 2024, 01:36 | #27 | ||
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There are relatively cheap ways of doing it but performance will be limited. Quote:
It's a really cool project, but it's difficult to see how they can make the economics work. |
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10 July 2024, 01:49 | #28 | ||||
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The real advantage of emulation is that you don't need any original Amiga hardware. However that does mean that you miss out on a desirable part of the retro experience. Quote:
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10 July 2024, 01:56 | #29 |
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10 July 2024, 02:06 | #30 | |
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As for other applications, it would be super cool if after all these years the Amiga started to be used in consumer products, even if it didn't have quite the same performance as ARM etc. Not likely to happen though because you would need sales in the millions to justify it. Still you never know - would you buy a microwave oven or TV with 'Amiga Inside'? I would. Just need to get some Chinese manufacturer interested in it... |
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10 July 2024, 05:14 | #31 |
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68080 is just one of the many names for the code that boots up on the FPGA on the Vampire.
One of the first plans was to buy an off the shelf FPGA board like a Terasic DE-10, but then they realized they'd be just selling adapter boards like for the RPi. Like the AOS4 PPC solutions, they realized if anyone could just assemble some off the shelf components and boot an OS onto it, it's like a $50 adapter. Why not just make your own crazy boards at five times the cost? This goes into PPC chips as well, oh they're expensive, slapping an SoC PPC board together with some RAM is going to cost a mint. A $90 PPC CPU available for a decade is about 4X the speed of the 68K FPGA emulation on a Vampire. Now, is the FPGA on the Vampire less than $25, YES! Sometimes! Is the CPU on the RPi loading a different ROM and OS on boot to get to the environment you want to get to less than $25? Yes! How fast is it? About 10X faster than the Vampire, just loading on a different ROM on boot on a cheaper piece of hardware. Well it must be expensive? No not really you can get an RPi and an adapter, on a bad day for 1/4 the cost of a Vampire. Well what's the registration fees to use that stuff? Who do I have to pay for the privilege of booting this thing up? |
10 July 2024, 06:01 | #32 |
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68080 is not "name for the code" - it is distinct functional block which can work basically independently on all other additions. This only implements CPU with memory interface. Anything else is optional, like actual 68k external bus interface or SAGA (and within SAGA things like Maggie3D are also distinct functional blocks resembling structure of actual chipset spread over few chips). V2 started with just 080, 68k external interface and iirc rtg. All other stuff was gradually added (yes, FPU support as well, same goes with SAGA which might've existed as blueprints before but only was introduced at some point with V4SA). It basically means while it does have both chipset and CPU inside one IC (FPGA itself) there are distinct entities which can work pretty much independently so you could've upload just SAGA to FPGA and connect it to regular 060 - it might work but rather slowly due to poor memory interface. 080 is separate entity, it should not be mixed with actual products so what V2 or V4 offers. V2/V4 is amalgamate of all the softcores produced by Apollo Team.
As for ASIC Vampire - even if it does materialize it would not be nearly as fast per clock as original design. Because now 080 with relatively low frequency operates with DRAM which is basically much faster. So there are less issues with cache misses and queue reload. With 1.5GHz ASIC (even if they do pass EMC and doesn't suffer from milions of issues along the way) the actual performance will be greatly affected by speed of memory interface and cache. And I am quite certain latency of memory will begin to influence performance greatly. Which is not an issue now in 100MHz range but we're talking about something 10-15x faster. That's why I think it was pretty darn funny when Gunnar was comparing memory performance of DDR3 based 080 and PowerPC working with regular SDRAM... yeah. But even then that PPC was tuned to work well with relatively slow main memory vs core speed. 080 is not. And while I think faster memory is possible to implement for ASIC vampire it might push actual dev team too far or inflate price even further. Because we're basically talking about effective memory speed of well over 3GHz. That's not for some DIY ... |
10 July 2024, 06:58 | #33 |
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With gaming being my strict priority, all these options leave me fairly uninterested. I totally get it how they might be exciting for people who are into Amiga's productivity applications and coding, and it's nice that there are new hardware developments, but in the end - for me - all this talk about moar mHz and super-features means nothing if there are no new games that can use it (I don't count ports here, while technically impressive they aren't exactly "new").
Of course writing new games utilizing such powerful machines is far from trivial and higly unlikely it will ever happen. But that's the reason why I'm perfectly happy with my OG HW A500's and MiSTer's slightly-faster A1200 core. Admittedly, the latter could be a bit more faster yet, so as to provide snappier WB experience, but I suppose that will eventually happen in the next ~5 years, once a more powerful (but still affordable) FPGA board appears. |
10 July 2024, 08:02 | #34 | ||||||
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There is quite a difference if you start with something you know you can turn with a little help into a full software product, or you ignore compatibility and create something that breaks on purpose existing software. Quote:
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Many people had a more positive attitude towards Gunnar if Gunnar would have a more positive attutide to them. Gunnar outright ignored the written down will of the P96 designers, to name the nail on his coffin for me. I had a more positive attitude if he wouldn't give me the feeling that software is worthless, and should be free and unpaid. Gunnar abuses people for the sake of his only interest, and that's not an attitude to work with in a market that small. |
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10 July 2024, 08:06 | #35 | |
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There are more issues coming up with faster cores. Currently, the 68EC080 has a write-through cache. That's doable because memory is relatively fast compared to the relatively slow core (by today's means), but this type of cache will become an issue with the core being faster, as you say. You then need a copyback cache, which means that the data in the memory can become inconsistent with the memory in the CPU. At this point, you have the issue that DMA might access stale data, because DMA cycles access memory, not the CPU cache, and at this point, you again need the MMU if you want to allow to support DMA devices on the Zorro bus. Oh well... |
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10 July 2024, 08:06 | #36 |
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Vampire’s “new chipsets” are mainly made to create vendor lock-in. Their entire business plan verged on incompatible instructions that would only work on Vampire with the logic that “exclusive software” making use of it would then assure the users’ need for a Vampire.
Too bad for them that alienating developers isn’t the best way of getting “exclusive software” done and then the final nail in the coffin (hehe) came when PiStorm became mainstream and utterly destroyed their chances of achieving their plans. The entire market for Vampires evaporated in mere months. Why purchase an expensive Vampire when you can just purchase a PiStorm for 1/4 of the price? You’re even using the *original* chipset of your Amiga for maximum compatibility instead of a rough approximation of the behaviours of the original chipset (that excluding the weird-ass extensions they wanted to push on the entire community). So no “HURRR BUT PISTORM IS EMULATIOONNNNN”, since Vampire is “emulation” as well. They’re just happening differently (one is emulated in software and the other in hardware) - the only difference is that PiStorm’s emulation is for a matter of fact more accurate to the original hardware because it doesn’t try to reimplement everything. So you’re still using your Amiga chipset instead of turning it into an enormous I/O + PSU board. If someone thinks that Apollo-core Team isn’t in this just for the money and/or a lot of ego on someone’s part they’ve been drinking too much of their Kool-Aid. The vendor lock-in part is very explicit about that. They never wanted to “save the Amiga”, because if they did, they wouldn’t do all that stupid crap the way they did in their implementation. The ASIC will never materialise since PiStorm took their market and they would never recoup the costs of a production run. Heck, I have always thought that the entire “Vampire ASIC” thing was just baloney to get people to invest in their ecosystem in the hopes of an ASIC version ever happening, even if they knew very well (as Thomas just explained) that it wouldn’t be a very realistic possibility. Very curious to see if the Apollo-core Team will stick around after their sales plummet to nothingness. That said, back to the thread at hand - PPC has always been a dead-end (Amiga should’ve dropped it as soon as Apple switched to Intel) and won’t be making a comeback. The original 68k line is deader than dead, so the only way “forward” to keep producing hardware is emulated 68k on ARM. I am pretty sure I advocated for an ARM version of AmigaOS back in 2009-2010 on this very same forum. Oh, the very different state the Amiga market would be in now if someone of the “decision makers” caught a glimpse of that Glad to see someone going in that direction (I am referring to the A600GS with their mixed-code approach, even if I don’t approve of everything AmigaKit has done with it) - one can only hope (and keep dreaming) that one day an ARM-native version of AmigaOS 3.3 will appear Last edited by jbenam; 10 July 2024 at 08:12. |
10 July 2024, 08:47 | #37 | |
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For example https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL1MB1/intro.html Talos II Lite Mainboard for $2,062.24 USD. https://www.raptorcs.com/content/CP9M31/intro.html IBM POWER9 v2 CPU (4-Core, 16 threads, 3.2Ghz base, 3.8 Ghz turbo) for $944.87 USD. I can obtain IBM Power9 CPU Processor Module 02AA966 for AUD $326.84 to AUD $586.80. There's $180 USD price Power9 CPU in the USA. A CPU by itself is useless. QorIQ T2080 Reference Design Board (T2080RDB-PC) with PowerPC e6500 has $1,853.137 USD asking price and it doesn't run AmigaOS 4.1 FE. Don't expect Windows-level interoperability experience with various 3rd party PowerPC boards since the PowerPC camp has very weak standards. This is the problem with the RISC alternative. Many clowns in RISC land wants to boat anchor the customer with anti-interoperability customization. Last edited by hammer; 10 July 2024 at 09:24. |
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10 July 2024, 09:05 | #38 | |
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Why would you pick an processor with no modern mainline compiler chain, no support for questionable vendor support, no future proofing guarantees, just no modern ecosystem and it's unable to run a modern a modern RTOS' or just a Linux kernel for a new product? I can go through the catalogues of various ARM vendors and pick a processor that fits my exact product requirements, have proper BSP's, SDK's, and a whole ecosystem around them and not need to gamble my whole project away because when I was a teenager I liked handcoding m68k assembler. And here's the thing, I can't imagine that Gunnar doesn't realize this as an ex-IBM'r. Which makes the whole ASIC-waffle even more of a disingenuous/scummy/cultish promise (pick your flavor). |
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10 July 2024, 09:21 | #39 | |
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Cache coherence competent chipset matters since classic Pentium. MAI Teron was labeled cache coherent incompetent by a Linux programmer. There's a long way to go for AC68080 to reach P5 Pentium's cache coherence competency. A smart and modern Northbridge functions are needed for AC68080. |
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10 July 2024, 09:25 | #40 | |
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Emulation like WinUAE does leave out a desirable part of the retro experience indeed, using a physical Amiga is much more fun. Seeing the Amiga making use of modern/current tech is a kind of magical experience For me WinUAE is more like a tool to manage my Amiga's like giving me an easy way to setup a new HDD, testing software etc. |
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