Future of A1200 accelerators

What do we (community) think will happen with the A1200 accelerators now that the Vampire for 1200 seems to become reality? Would you still buy a Blizzard PPC (non PPC boards are all obsolete because Vampire exceeds them all in performance and price) or would you go for the Vampire?

Just curious what people think.

[DanyPPC]

Ok for the Vampire, but old style accelerators have their appeal and they garantee compatibility.

So I think there will be the Vampire but also the classic 030/060 accelerators.

PowerPC performance are far for now.

[8bitbubsy]

Originally Posted by Syntrax

Would you still buy a Blizzard PPC (non PPC boards are all obsolete because Vampire exceeds them all in performance and price) or would you go for the Vampire?

I would buy neither of them, because I think they don't belong in an Amiga system at all.

[Gordon]

Vampire is not an accelerator. It does not accelerate an amiga. It takes over the amiga and turns it into a different machine. If thats your thing then I respect your choice.
So I think true accelerators like the a1221 will blizzards will always have a place.

[Retro-Nerd]

This is just a niche in a nice. Normal 12xx accelarators will always exist. Icomp will release new cards this year, also with 040/60 CPUs if you really need that kind of power. Couldn't care less about PPC or Vampire stuff.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Gordon

Vampire is not an accelerator. It does not accelerate an amiga. It takes over the amiga and turns it into a different machine.
.

If you keep the custom chips running, what's the difference from a normal accelerator card with FastRAM onboard?
If you equip your Amiga with an additional graphics card next to your normal accelerator you have basically what a Vampire does with your system.

The only custom chip in an amiga (IMHO) worth using from a fast accelerator is the audio chip. AGA, IDE and Chipmem are way too old and introduce real bottlenecks for a fast processor. A fast amiga doesn't need 160 MB/s IDE performance or a 2.4 GHZ processor or a 1 GB/s network card, but a decent 1920x1080 24 bit color display would be nice. 256 Mb memory is not enough for the future. Browsers easily use more memory displaying one page. All my opinion of course.

[Daedalus]

A 1920x1080 24-bit display is a bit of a struggle for a Vampire, though it is easily doable with a Mediator-based setup. Browsers lack someone to code them, even if you ignore the massive shortfall in CPU power needed for the modern web - a 2GHz single-core machine will struggle with some websites these days, so what hope has a Vampire at a couple of hundred MHz? Other than web browsing, what do you need that much RAM for? There's no massive software suites - perhaps working on very long CD-quality audio tracks, but that's a pretty niche thing that, like browsing, is far better suited to the performance of a modern PC.

[NovaCoder]

It's an interesting question for sure.


In some ways an A1200 with a simple fastram expansion is enough, in other ways an 030 is perfect and for other people they'd rather have an overclocked 060 and maybe a GFX card.

So it's very hard to say what the future will be but without OpenGL hardware support then there is no point going much above 100-200 MIPS because no software/games need that much (apart from DOSBox of course LoL).

I think my dream accelerator would be able to reliably run at 100-200 MIPS, have 256-500mb RAM and have a hard drive controller built in.

If you coupled that kind of accelerator to some kind of indivision AGA with chunky support (RTG) then it would be great.

[solidcore]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

A 1920x1080 24-bit display is a bit of a struggle for a Vampire, though it is easily doable with a Mediator-based setup. Browsers lack someone to code them, even if you ignore the massive shortfall in CPU power needed for the modern web - a 2GHz single-core machine will struggle with some websites these days, so what hope has a Vampire at a couple of hundred MHz? Other than web browsing, what do you need that much RAM for? There's no massive software suites - perhaps working on very long CD-quality audio tracks, but that's a pretty niche thing that, like browsing, is far better suited to the performance of a modern PC.

Yeah directly from the fpga it's a stretch, but they could have used an upscaler IC instead of differential pair lvds outputs of the fpga directly to the hdmi header. I am unsure why they didn't, there are plenty of 24-bit RGB to 1080p upscaler IC's for cheap by Analog Devices which also support PCM audio etc . Maybe they ran out of pins. But could have used multiplexers in any case.

[nexus]

1 thing for PPC is there is tons of code for it today that can be used
very little for some custom 68k

[Marchie]

Vamp 1200 looks amazing, although half the fun is seeing how much a 1200 with a fast RAM can do (and it continues to surprise me how much that is).

If I wanted to go high-end, the V1200 looks like the choice option (although everything depends on price - and I haven't seen one for the V1200 or the proposed new 040/060 cards yet).

The downside (if it can be called a downside) to anything in the 060/'080' realm is that, as mentioned above, the CPU is faster for pretty much everything, so the way you make the machine faster is by not using it and off-loading everything to the accelerator instead.

[sean_sk]

Originally Posted by Gordon

Vampire is not an accelerator. It does not accelerate an amiga. It takes over the amiga and turns it into a different machine.

Untrue if you choose to output your video through the RGB port. In this case, much of the A1200 chipset is being used including the blitter.

On the other hand, if you choose to output video through the Vampires onboard HDMI port then you end up bypassing most of it.

So yes, the V1200 can be used as an accelerator.

[eXeler0]

Long story short(?) I like to have a variation of accelerators in my Amigas (and I got a bunch of them), so there's room for a lot of stuff however I never really took the PPC path. I agree it has plenty of software by now, but for ME it just doesnt feel right to have an incompatible OS in the mix..
With the "genuine" 68k stuff we'll never go much beyond 100MIPS, but with Vampire it will be possible to run 68k code much faster as you can migrate the core to new, faster FPGAs in the future.. (And theres the ASIC option of course).
So yea the Vampire with all features "On" really turn the Amiga into a clumsy keyboard, but personally I'm fine with it because it does it while keeping things Amiga-esque.. no ugly hacks, like I felt about the idea of running PPC binaries on the Blizzard PPC.. (and becaue I still have like 8 amigas with no vampire ;-)
Anf IF they wanted to, the vampire really could be turned into an accelerator only.. Just using the 080 core+ fastmem but not the graphical stuff.

[UberFreak]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

I think my dream accelerator would be able to reliably run at 100-200 MIPS, have 256-500mb RAM and have a hard drive controller built in.

If you coupled that kind of accelerator to some kind of indivision AGA with chunky support (RTG) then it would be great.

You basically described a Vampire v2, just with RTG instead of indivision-like functionality (which you can add).

[UberFreak]

Originally Posted by Gordon

Vampire is not an accelerator. It does not accelerate an amiga. It takes over the amiga and turns it into a different machine. If thats your thing then I respect your choice.
So I think true accelerators like the a1221 will blizzards will always have a place.

Repeating this won't make it true.
The only chip current Vampires (v2) replace is the CPU, the Amiga chipset is fully in use.
Its basically an accelerator + GFX card.

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by UberFreak

You basically described a Vampire v2, just with RTG instead of indivision-like functionality (which you can add).

Yep kinda but not quite

[HenryCase]

Originally Posted by UberFreak

Repeating this won't make it true.
The only chip current Vampires (v2) replace is the CPU, the Amiga chipset is fully in use.
Its basically an accelerator + GFX card.

That depends on which "core" you run.


With the current Vampire V2 accelerators, you have the choice between two sets of cores. The version 2 series of cores (e.g version 2.11) doesn't replace the OCS/ECS chipset, whereas version 3 of the core (currently in alpha/beta) does replace the OCS/ECS chipset with their own enhanced AGA implementation. So in other words you have the choice of whether to run the Vampire as a fast Amiga accelerator that still utilises the original custom chips, or to run the Vampire as a more complete system.

[UberFreak]

Exactly, you have a choice not to replace (most of) the Amiga chipset, which makes the comment I responded to untrue or at least, inaccurate.
AFAIK, no vampire is currently sold with Core 3, which seems to be far from ready for public consumption.

As for the A1200 version, I would personally take Core 2.x (with FPU) over 3 and add a scan-doubler if I feel like it, or better yet, keep using CRT
I'm just in it for the CPU power, everything else is optional nice-to-have bonus.

[HenryCase]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

Yep kinda but not quite

Yes, not quite, you were more accurately describing the Vampire V4.



> "100-200 MIPS"
Check...
*I can't find a direct link for the V4, but even the V2 can do over 100 MIPS*



> "256-500mb RAM"
Check...
http://wiki.apollo-accelerators.com/doku.php/faq
"512MB DDR3 RAM"


> "hard drive controller built in."

Check...
http://wiki.apollo-accelerators.com/doku.php/faq
"FastIDE 40/44-pin connectors"

> "with chunky support (RTG)"
Check...
[ Show youtube player ]