How much of the Vampire Accelerator claims are hyped?

[S0ulA55a551n]

If you ignore trying to use it to emulate aga on non aga machines or native output over HDMI.

It was/is the fastest 68k compliant accelerator you can buy, with the bonus of the fastest possible chip ram access, sd cards, cf cards and workbench over HDMI.

I personally think its best to ignore all the guff like AMMX and SVGA and just take it for the above mentioned

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by S0ulA55a551n

If you ignore trying to use it to emulate aga on non aga machines or native output over HDMI.

It was/is the fastest 68k compliant accelerator you can buy, with the bonus of the fastest possible chip ram access, sd cards, cf cards and workbench over HDMI.

I personally think its best to ignore all the guff like AMMX and SVGA and just take it for the above mentioned

Yeah, at the end of the day if you take out those new features it's just a 68060 on steroids...which is still not a bad thing, mind you

[grond]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Engineers in every other industry have no problem calling it emulation, it's only a few armchair experts in niches of the retro community who seem to be offended by the term.

I am an electronics engineer and have never heard anyone call an FPGA an emulation. But then hardly anyone uses FPGAs to recreate existing microchips, they get used not only to test new designs before taping them out but also for production in low numbers where an ASIC wouldn't pay off. In both cases the FPGA is an implementation of some required functionality, not an emulation of the functionality. It does what it is supposed to do, after all.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by grond

I am an electronics engineer and have never heard anyone call an FPGA an emulation.

Yes you have: me I've mentioned it in the past and I've mentioned it in a later post in this thread. I'm sure I don't count in your eyes though, so let's look at some other examples you may have heard of and might be less likely to dismiss: Dave Haynie's a good one, and Xilinx (who probably know a thing or two about FPGAs) even market a range of products specifically for ASIC emulation.

But I guess if it's not something that happens in your specific area of industry, you're unlikely to hear it used. In my little corner I've used them not to emulate specific chips, but boards that are based on old technology and need drop-in replacements using modern parts. This is for low-volume industrial and scientific equipment where an ASIC is unfeasible.

[Promilus]

and have never heard anyone call an FPGA an emulation. But then hardly anyone uses FPGAs to recreate existing microchips

Emulation definition covers imitation of functionality of one system on different system. System being either hardware of software. "Recreating" OCS functionality on FPGA can surely be considered emulation. Cycle-accurate 68000 softcore can be considered 68000 emulator as well. There were and are FPGA based simulators for products still in development with no silicon predecessor. Emulation differs in only one aspect. There's already original system somewhere out there. And all you have is how it behaves externally. What signals at the inputs causes specific reaction at the outputs. And so on. Unless you have absolutely full logic description of original system you can't really claim your softcore is just reimplementation. And there are some chips which have been "mapped" down to single logic node. Like 6502. And there is physical reimplementation of it using discrete transistors. There's also node list which was used to create Verilog 6502 softcore, cycle accurate and internal logic accurate. And only those can be really described as reimplementation. AFAIK OCS and AGA cores of MiSTer aren't actually based on netlists but rather how "black box" behaves. And thus hardware emulation fits perfectly despite them claiming otherwise.

[Karlos]

I think it's reasonable to refer to something as an emulation if it makes use of non-purpose designed components to implement the behaviour of the original. In that view an FPGA is a huge collection of gates and more complex units waiting to be wired together. It's not an emulation in the imperative, stepwise software sense of the word, but it's an implementation made from soft-wiring of otherwise general purpose components.

At the risk of sounding like Matt Hey, an ASIC is a "ground truth" implementation of something in hardware. An FPGA is one layer of abstraction away, but still realised in hardware. Software emulation is the logical conclusion of making further and further abstractions.

[Gorf]

The original Motorola 68000 is an heavily microcoded 16bit IC that emulates the instruction set of a 32bit CPU.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Yes you have: me I've mentioned it in the past and I've mentioned it in a later post in this thread. I'm sure I don't count in your eyes though, so let's look at some other examples you may have heard of and might be less likely to dismiss: Dave Haynie's a good one, and Xilinx (who probably know a thing or two about FPGAs) even market a range of products specifically for ASIC emulation.

But emulation is a specific purpose. Do you apply that term generally to whatever an FPGA does regardless of its actual use? An FPGA can be used to emulate an ASIC if your goal is to find out how the ASIC you are intending to produce will behave. But if you design a motor control device using an FPGA rather than a microcontroller because you need low latency, would you say the FPGA is an emulator emulating a motor controller you never intend to turn into an ASIC? I'd say it's an FPGA holding an implementation of a motor controller and thus is a motor controller implemented as an FPGA. Just like an ASIC-motor controller would be a motor controller implemented as an ASIC.

But I guess if it's not something that happens in your specific area of industry, you're unlikely to hear it used.

I worked as a microchip developer. We made testchips and never used FPGAs. That was because we did high-speed analogue and mixed-signal design, not digital circuits.

In my little corner I've used them not to emulate specific chips, but boards that are based on old technology and need drop-in replacements using modern parts. This is for low-volume industrial and scientific equipment where an ASIC is unfeasible.

And then you call your FPGA an emulator?

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by grond

Do you apply that term generally to whatever an FPGA does regardless of its actual use?

Of course not.

And then you call your FPGA an emulator?

Yes, that's my point. It's emulating the old board.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Of course not.


Yes, that's my point. It's emulating the old board.

But the Vampires do not emulate an old board, they implement a new CPU member of the 68k ISA.

[Promilus]

But Vampire does emulate AGA, does it not?

[walkero]

Let's say, and maybe agree, that the Vampire FPGA is a 68K compatible CPU implemented on a hardware level and the PiStorm is the same on a software level. Both have the same goal, to accelerate old computers (or replace them as V4 stand-alone does) with a degree of compatibility that is getting better and better over time. In the end, the thing that matters is how many things the user can do with the hardware he chooses, how fast, with the least of the problems.

In my opinion, if the AMMX and the 3D API that Vampires bring are not used to accelerate graphical engines (i.e. SDL, Warp3D etc.) or video playback they are going to end up useless. So, there is a need for software to be written for things like that, and as much as I know, to use them you need to write Assembly, as there seems to not have them available for C/C++ etc. But I might be wrong about that.

I don't have any of them, but what I see so far is:
1. PiStorm costs 1/6th of what Vampire does, and it is a loooooot faster in many benchmarks
2. Vampires are pretty closed-source, so no one can see how things are implemented and how to contribute. If the Vampire breaks up or people leave (which happened) you might end up with a not supported hardware (which happened).
3. PiStorms can get even faster if you just change the Raspberry Pi you use. So this can be expanded even further. And there is no limit because there are a lot of SoC boards out there with the same headers like Raspberry Pis and the same CPU family that could easily be supported in the future.

If I would buy any of these today, I would go with the PiStorm because it is cheaper, way faster, open and easy to extend in the future.

[Promilus]

3. PiStorms can get even faster if you just change the Raspberry Pi you use. So this can be expanded even further. And there is no limit because there are a lot of SoC boards out there with the same headers like Raspberry Pis and the same CPU family that could easily be supported in the future.

Oh? Name one.

[E-Penguin]

Originally Posted by Promilus

But Vampire does emulate AGA, does it not?

Not. There's no AGA on my V600v2.

The V4 standalone ones do, perhaps.

[Promilus]

E-Penguin - there were some beta cores with AGA instead of hard FPU ...

[hooverphonique]

Originally Posted by walkero

3. And there is no limit because there are a lot of SoC boards out there with the same headers like Raspberry Pis and the same CPU family that could easily be supported in the future.

PiStorm uses the Pi SoC's SMI (secondary memory interface) to transfer data to/from the Amiga. I would not expect that to be present on other SBC's even if they have a "Pi-compatible" GPIO header.

[walkero]

Originally Posted by Promilus

Oh? Name one.

ASUS SBC Tinker board (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07CTHT65P)



Odroid C4 (https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-c4/odroid-c4)

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by grond

But the Vampires do not emulate an old board, they implement a new CPU member of the 68k ISA.

But WinUAE doesn't emulate an old Amiga, it implements a new hypothetical Amiga...

[Promilus]

@walkero
Both have absolutely different SoCs than RPi's Broadcom. Odroid has Amlogic S905 and ASUS has Rockchip RK3288. Neither can be used as a replacement for RPi in that specific project. Perhaps different interface might be of use, like eMMC but since those guys didn't invent it this way there's slim chance someone else will. So PiStorm is exclusively RPi and emu68 is exclusively RPi.

[walkero]

@Promilus
Possibly you are right. To be honest, finding a good alternative needs more investigation and tests, and maybe what hooverphonique said about SMI is true, which I don't know. But in any way, this is not the major feature of Pistorm. There are/will be a lot of raspberry pies out there for someone to buy and use.