Buffee... It's alive!!

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by Promilus

Well 030 performance claims might at least be feasible, 040 1GHz figure seems to be unrealistic ...

Hehe yes. I just took something out of the air. Can we say 700 MHz

Vampire is a different beast in many ways.

If you are after fastest possible RTG, 16-bit sound options, fastest possible RAM access and disk speed. These things will be faster with Vampire.

Try to render a picture and run something CPU intensive and Vampire will be no match.

For me Buffee is perfect. I like to use original chipsets.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by UberFreak

When the Buffee can emulate an 68060 with higher performance than the Vampire, then we might call it a "Vampire killer".
Right now? nah.

I think the idea is that if you have a 3GHz 030 equivalent you wont miss the 060 too much ;-)

Btw, there will never be a single product that is right for everyone, that is why some of us solve this problem in Amigaland by buying 10+ Amigas with different configs ;-) I ordered (or at least I payed for one anyway) one of the Beta Buffees. The idea is that it will sit in the A500 next to 060 1200 and the 030 CD32. ;-) Options!

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

What I like about this project is that is not trying to expand the CPU by adding proprietary opcodes or replicating/enhancing the chipset, it's just a bloody fast accelerator

Same here.

Getting more and more away from RTG and prefer using the chipset again.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

It sounds like my MiSTer FPGA will also benefit from this project by using the ARM to greatly improve Amiga performance (fingers crossed!)

The ARM in MiSTer is very low performance compared to the ones in Buffee or PiSTorm

[alexh]

I'm curious to see how this performs compared to the insanely cheap PiSTorm which is roughly 040@40 performance at the moment. It's just had a new denise adapter board designed which plugs into the RPi camera port to give rgb2hdmi like functionality using a single RPi. It now has RTG + scandoubled native pass through. For less than £60

Plus native mass storage at USB2 speed or higher, native mouse, & keyboard support via USB, FastRAM, MT32 midi and others I've forgotten. WiFi and AHI are pending.

I understand the argument, why plug it into an Amiga why not use the RPi to emulate everything? Because it's cool. It's no different than a Vampire in terms of ethics and people seem to like them

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by alexh

I'm curious to see how this performs compared to the insanely cheap PiSTorm which is roughly 040@40 performance at the moment. It's just had a new denise adapter board designed which plugs into the RPi camera port to give rgb2hdmi like functionality using a single RPi. It now has RTG + scandoubled native pass through. For less than £60

Plus native mass storage at USB2 speed or higher, native mouse, & keyboard support via USB, FastRAM, MT32 midi and others I've forgotten. WiFi and AHI are pending.

I understand the argument, why plug it into an Amiga why not use the RPi to emulate everything? Because it's cool. It's no different than a Vampire in terms of ethics and people seem to like them

Again, Buffee well destroy other solution in pure CPU speed, nothing else.
I guess you all understand that CPU speed is just a part of a computer system. Busses, very limited chip ram, max 2MB. ECS or AGA gfx. Paula sound etc. To me it is the beauty of the Amiga

Vampire is also different regarding PiStorm.
First of all it is faster. It got a new Audio system supporting CD sound, 8 channels.
Native gfx drivers. Dedicated OS with network stack and much more, MMX, 080 intstructions etc.
Vampire is in many ways if you believe in future develoment of the 68k platform.
It is a kind of NG system with classic compatibility.

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by alexh

The ARM in MiSTer is very low performance compared to the ones in Buffee or PiSTorm

It's all relative my friend

Using the ARM to just do the CPU emulation and using the FPGA to only re-create the custom chipset is a very elegant solution methinks.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by nikosidis

Again, Buffee well destroy other solution in pure CPU speed

There hasn't been any benchmarks published yet but I'm sure you're right

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

It's all relative my friend
Using the ARM to just do the CPU emulation and using the FPGA to only re-create the custom chipset is a very elegant solution methinks.

Sure but the 2*800MHz A9 in the MiSTer are much slower than the 4*1.5GHz A72's in say an RPi4. But the ARM<->FPGA interface in MiSTer is much more efficient and flexible than the RPi's GPIO, so we'll see.

[kriz]

So when are they expecting this to be fully functional ? Why advertise it if it does not run anything yet ?

[d4rk3lf]

Do you guys think Buffee would be capable running youtube videos even in 360p (or lower), and "on the fly" decompressing the videos with reduction of color to 32, or Ham mode?

[roondar]

I'd say that the Chip RAM bus speed might be more of an issue here than the CPU speed. The extremely fast 68030 will be waiting a lot of the time for getting a full frame out every frame. Assuming an OCS system, the CPU speed to Chip RAM will be limited to 3.5MB/second, or about 73KB per frame. A 320x256x5 screen takes up 50KB, a frame's worth of Paula audio @28KHz would take up 8,9KB.

With that in mind, the answer would be: if the Buffee CPU is fast enough to decode YouTube while spending around 80% of it's time waiting on Chip memory then yes, it can do it. If it can't, well... Then the answer is no.

And to be clear: I have no idea if a 640MHz 68030 equivalent (20% of 3,2GHz) could decode YouTube low quality videos. Might be doable, who knows

Edit: that said, having the equivalent of a 640MHz 68030 left while redrawing the entire frame every frame and playing back stereo 28KHz sound should make an awful lot of things possible on A500 using OCS that are not possible right now. Doom at full speed? No problem! High end 2D games? No problem! Etc.

Heck, you may even do extra cool stuff with the Copper because rebuilding a full Copperlist every frame is now not only feasible but also outright cheap.

[DDNI]

Originally Posted by roondar

Doom at full speed? No problem! High end 2D games? No problem! Etc.

Yes all very interesting, I look forward to reviews.
On the Doom at full speed point, I watched a pistorm video running doom. The framerate was really quite low. I'm not close to pistorm though so uncertain how it compares to the buffee project hardware.

[roondar]

Well, to be fair I only really looked at the amount of bandwidth left in the theoretical sense. It obviously is not quite as simple as just 20% bandwidth left = 20% cycles left without any other issues. But in theory it should be feasible - if the stated performance level of 3.2GHz 68030 is accurate.

For now, I'm assuming it is. Reviews will tell us how accurate my guess end up being

[d4rk3lf]

Thanks Roondar for doing the math.

Well, I guess it remains to be seen.
I only hope that programming app that would do decoding and other stuff is not big pain to be made.

[voyager]

I like this thing very much but without a IDE or SD interface what to use for storage?
Hunt down a old A590?

[Pyromania]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Do you guys think Buffee would be capable running youtube videos even in 360p (or lower), and "on the fly" decompressing the videos with reduction of color to 32, or Ham mode?

Why not, it will be screaming along like a 1 Thz 68000.

[Tigerskunk]

I really love this concept of a super fast 68K CPU and the original Chipset being driven to its limits with it.

We are living in interesting times.

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by voyager

I like this thing very much but without a IDE or SD interface what to use for storage?
Hunt down a old A590?

Do not worry mate. There will be internal options for A500

With A600, A1200 it is not an issue.

[UberFreak]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

I think the idea is that if you have a 3GHz 030 equivalent you wont miss the 060 too much ;-)

If it can't run software compiled/written for 040/060, its of no use to me.
In my opinion, this day and age, a new accelerator based on emulation/simulation must be able to run *all* Amiga 68k software.
Otherwise, I just don't see the point.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by UberFreak

If it can't run software compiled/written for 040/060, its of no use to me.
In my opinion, this day and age, a new accelerator based on emulation/simulation must be able to run *all* Amiga 68k software.
Otherwise, I just don't see the point.

Well, then we can agree Buffee is not for you (at least not atm). ;-)