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      /  Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
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Arko 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 12-Jun-2011 17:33:04
#41 ]
Super Member
Joined: 17-Jan-2007
Posts: 1989
From: Unknown

@ChrisH

Quote:


It's a great shame you aren't interested in adding a PPC card for Natami, ...


AFAIK you can add every PCI-PPC Card in Natami, so it's on Hyperion, the MorphOS team or others to support PPC on Natami, think they will support this PCI cards for Natami like they supported this PCI cards in x86 or Mac systems.

Last edited by Arko on 12-Jun-2011 at 05:36 PM.

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I borrowed this comments from here (#27 & #28):
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wawa 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 12-Jun-2011 20:31:25
#42 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 21-Jan-2008
Posts: 6259
From: Unknown

@Arko

right, looks like that. add to that, how sam460 is supported, and think twice.

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Hyperionmp 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 12-Jun-2011 20:49:22
#43 ]
Hyperion
Joined: 8-Mar-2003
Posts: 502
From: Unknown

@BigGun

To answer your question below which I quote here:

"@Hyperion:
Would it be possible to compile OS4 for 68K too?
Running 68K Cores with high speed memory and with real good bus connections,
did show me that the 68K cores can still be stronger than you would think at first.
Next gen FPGA 68K cores or highly "tuned" 68K system competes surprising well with lower end PPC systems.
What do you think?

Or is recompiling impossible meaning that a PPC will always be the only option to run OS4?"

The AmigaOS 4.x kernel was rewritten from scratch in C but does contain some PPC assembly for some very low level parts.

In addition, the emulation layer is also in PPC assembly albeit that would in theory not be a showstopper since a "real" 68K CPU is available. On the Classic version of AmigaOS 4.x however not even an 060 is used since the overhead of the context switching between the CPU's (like WarpOS, PowerUP did) reduced the PPC to an expensive co-processor (i.e. the Cyberstorm/BlizzardPPC architecture was from ideal which is why AmigaOS 4.x turns off the 68K CPU as part of its boot process).

Then there are some legal issues like some licences being tied to PPC only.

All of this could be worked around however given sufficient funding. E.g. an ARM/X-Scale version of AmigaOS 4.x is perfectly possible.

The least expensive way however to be able to run AmigaOS 4.x on the Natami would seem to be to avoid the design flaws of the CyberstormPPC/BlizzardPPC and design a PPC expansion it in such a way that no context switching with massive overhead would be required when operating with a PPC CPU expansion.

There are some very cheap Freescale CPU's coming our way in the near future which are highly integrated and will blow everything out of the water in their PPC price range EXCLUDING the AmigaOne X1000. THe PA SEMI chip remains a gem to these days.

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ChrisH 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 12-Jun-2011 21:19:03
#44 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 30-Jan-2005
Posts: 6679
From: Unknown

@BigGun Quote:
@Hyperion:
Would it be possible to compile OS4 for 68K too?
Running 68K Cores with high speed memory and with real good bus connections,
did show me that the 68K cores can still be stronger than you would think at first.
Next gen FPGA 68K cores or highly "tuned" 68K system competes surprising well with lower end PPC systems.
What do you think?

Or is recompiling impossible meaning that a PPC will always be the only option to run OS4?

Since a hypothetical "OS4 68k" would loose the huge library of existing OS4 software (which is PPC compiled), and it is highly questionable how much would or could be recompiled for 68k, I really don't see the point. (The same reasoning applies to a hypothetical "OS4 x86", as without backwards compatibility to the existing PPC software it would merely be a novelty.)

Porting OS4 to any CPU (even ARM) is technically possible, but it just wouldn't make much sense without spending a huge fortune on writing (or buying & integrating) a PPC emulator (not to mention endian issues in the x86 case).

Last edited by ChrisH on 12-Jun-2011 at 09:19 PM.

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eliyahu 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 12-Jun-2011 21:43:21
#45 ]
Super Member
Joined: 3-Mar-2010
Posts: 1957
From: Waterbury, Connecticut (USA)

@ChrisH

Quote:
Since a hypothetical "OS4 68k" would loose the huge library of existing OS4 software (which is PPC compiled), and it is highly questionable how much would or could be recompiled for 68k, I really don't see the point. (The same reasoning applies to a hypothetical "OS4 x86", as without backwards compatibility to the existing PPC software it would merely be a novelty.)

Porting OS4 to any CPU (even ARM) is technically possible, but it just wouldn't make much sense without spending a huge fortune on writing (or buying & integrating) a PPC emulator (not to mention endian issues in the x86 case).

as much as i'd like to see OS4 on additional platforms, i have to agree. of course hyperion know whether or not it would make commercial sense for them to invest the effort, but given that we're talking about pre-release hardware with a new architecture coupled with a new PPC co-processor card that hasn't even been announced let alone designed, well, it just doesn't seem likely.

and in any case that doesn't seem to be what natami is all about : the extension of the classic hardware platform itself running classic software natively. OS4 takes the platform into the future. the two really are different ends of the spectrum.

but obviously it is up to the principals to make up their own decisions.

-- eliyahu

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wawa 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 12-Jun-2011 21:59:08
#46 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 21-Jan-2008
Posts: 6259
From: Unknown

@Hyperionmp
Quote:

There are some very cheap Freescale CPU's coming our way in the near future which are highly integrated and will blow everything out of the water in their PPC price range EXCLUDING the AmigaOne X1000. THe PA SEMI chip remains a gem to these days.

what? ... ok, lets say then 500 eur cpu is cheap in your book, and there might even be cheaper units some day.
Quote:

Then there are some legal issues like some licences being tied to PPC only.

in other worlds os4 is limited to ppc, by licencing agreement wit ainc. or why a port to 68k couldnt be possible, or do i understand something wrong. i mean we arnt even talking ybout x86 here. that seems to be very limited licence, hyperion gained, alas.

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Lou 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 12-Jun-2011 23:27:46
#47 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 2-Nov-2004
Posts: 4169
From: Rhode Island

What's being overlooked here is that with FPGA technology, the rate at which products like NATAMI can meet the performance of PPC cpus is faster than the rate of more and more powerful PPC architectures being available to consumers.

Right now, a 110Mhz '060 can probably match a 233Mhz-300Mhz PPC.
What will an N070 on an even faster fpga running at 300Mhz do?

Also, as the fpga gets bigger, it could contain a PPC core along with a 68k core. It's probably easier to develop a PPC core than 68k core.

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Samurai_Crow 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 12-Jun-2011 23:47:07
#48 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 18-Jan-2003
Posts: 2320
From: Minnesota, USA

@Lou

Quote:

Lou wrote:
Also, as the fpga gets bigger, it could contain a PPC core along with a 68k core. It's probably easier to develop a PPC core than 68k core.


Ummm... The fact that Gunnar and Thomas work on PPC hardware during their day jobs all the time would reduce the "wow" factor to essentially NIL, not to mention that PPC hardware will continue to be built as ASICs for a while, thus allowing them to exceed the performance of softcores... if you can find the software to run on it.

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Samurai_Crow 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 13-Jun-2011 0:01:33
#49 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 18-Jan-2003
Posts: 2320
From: Minnesota, USA

@ChrisH

Quote:

ChrisH wrote:

Since a hypothetical "OS4 68k" would loose the huge library of existing OS4 software (which is PPC compiled), and it is highly questionable how much would or could be recompiled for 68k, I really don't see the point. (The same reasoning applies to a hypothetical "OS4 x86", as without backwards compatibility to the existing PPC software it would merely be a novelty.)

Porting OS4 to any CPU (even ARM) is technically possible, but it just wouldn't make much sense without spending a huge fortune on writing (or buying & integrating) a PPC emulator (not to mention endian issues in the x86 case).


OS4 running on existing hardware is already merely a novelty. There is a much bigger library of 68k software that doesn't run on OS 4 without an emulator and the emulator performance lags even on the best hardware platforms depending on the software you run on it.

The only part of what would be difficult to recompile for the NatAmi is the ports that aren't written in C/C++ or other high-level languages or are closed-source. Since the includes for a PPC-based Assembly program aren't included in the OS4 SDK, that means effectively ALL of the ports there should be recompilable to a 68k OS 4.

I personally, wouldn't recommend an x86 version of OS 4, although an AMD64 version would make more sense due to the higher number of general-purpose registers than x86. ARM might be interesting since it would mean a palm-top computer would be able to run it. But as always, the only limitation is closed-source software. And since most closed-source software for the Amiga is written for 68k, the other processors don't make much sense in the absence of a decent virtual machine.

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Samurai_Crow 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 13-Jun-2011 0:07:22
#50 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 18-Jan-2003
Posts: 2320
From: Minnesota, USA

@KimmoK

Quote:

KimmoK wrote:
@BigGun

I think AOS4 is on it's way to 64bit and people need more RAM in the future, so: Is there 64bit version planned of the FPGA 68k?
UPDATE: http://www.natami.net/qa.htm
It seems 64bit addressing is not in the plans... (so 2Gb RAM seems to be the maximum on Natami, the classic limitation)


What's stopping you from putting memory sockets on the accelerator card and setting the FPGA to run all of the DDR2 memory as CHIP memory? That way the FAST memory on the accelerator card can be more than 32-bits.

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Kronos 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 13-Jun-2011 0:40:45
#51 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 8-Mar-2003
Posts: 2553
From: Unknown

@Samurai_Crow

Chip-memory has to fit into the 32Bit address-space too cos it's shared between CPU and chipset.

Actually only 31Bit (aka 2GB) are fully useable in the context of the Amiga-API.


Adding another 2GB might be possible if you restrict it to apps explecitly allowing for "unsigned" memory.

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AmigaBlitter 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 13-Jun-2011 8:36:25
#52 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 26-Sep-2005
Posts: 3512
From: Unknown

@Hyperionmp

I read somewhere that Natami tech could be expanded with other chips. I'm quite sure i've seen even the Cell BE chip mentioned somewhere, cause someone of the Team worked with the Cell BE already. Just an advice by a profane in that matter: please consider the eventuality of a talk with the Natami team. There still lots of classic Amiga users that could/would benefits of a port for such platform. If OS4.0 was well accepted and welcome by the classic users, enought to justify a port of the 4.1, would be not a bad move to consider and the Natami evolution as a possible part of AmigaOS hardware ecosystem. I know i'm not an Hyperion insider and i don't know what are the facts that push Hyperion moving in this or another direction. Sure i can thing that there are smart and capable people that know their own way and make wise decision for the platform, but let me explain the point of view of a user (i think not the only one) would expect such a move from Hyperion.

regards

Last edited by AmigaBlitter on 13-Jun-2011 at 08:43 AM.

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KimmoK 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 13-Jun-2011 11:05:27
#53 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 14-Mar-2003
Posts: 5211
From: Ylikiiminki, Finland

@more RAM to Natami

Another way might be to use the first 2Gb space for 68k SW and some 30Gb for PPC SW.
(meaning a CPU card with both FPGA 68k and PPC or FPGA 68k on the CPU slot and PPC on PCI (or on some future) slot)

... thought:
After 10 000 Natami boards are sold, the sales people might have cash to fund PPC card & AOS4 porting. Or after some PPC card exist for those thousands of sold natamis, Hyperion might do to port anyway...

(ofcourse 10000 is insane amount of Amigalike HW to be sold, it "only" needs a miracle)

Last edited by KimmoK on 13-Jun-2011 at 11:22 AM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 13-Jun-2011 at 11:20 AM.

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KimmoK 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 13-Jun-2011 11:11:03
#54 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 14-Mar-2003
Posts: 5211
From: Ylikiiminki, Finland

@Cool_amigaN

I agree that 2GB is plenty for Amiga SW (today).
But I (just as an example) found out that 8GB would be very nice when handling stuff like mpeg2 to/from mpeg4 encoding. With 8GB I could convert one DVD (for example with DVD::RIP) without stressing the HDD.

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ChrisH 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 13-Jun-2011 11:35:36
#55 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 30-Jan-2005
Posts: 6679
From: Unknown

@Samurai_Crow Quote:
There is a much bigger library of 68k software that doesn't run on OS 4 without an emulator and the emulator performance lags even on the best hardware platforms depending on the software you run on it.

By "emulator" I assume you mean E-UAE.

Please don't spread mis-information: AmigaOS4 runs a lot of classic 68k software fine (e.g. Wordworth & Art Effects), and for the stuff it doesn't (usually hardware-banging games) E-UAE generally (say 90% of the time) runs them very well thank you. RunInUAE gives E-UAE an optimised configuration, and if your monitor supports 320x240 (or 320x256) then most A500 games run almost flawlessly even on a lowly Sam440 - just ask DAX

I'm not claiming that E-UAE runs everything flawlessly on a 667MHz Sam440, but IMHO it's "good enough" for many (most?) people.

I think there are a lot of reasons for wanting a NatAmi, and you don't need to bash OS4's classic compatibilty to promote NatAmi. If you don't want to be responsible for starting another pointless "MOS vs OS4" style war (everyone would be loosers), then I suggest you reconsider your NatAmi sales tactics.

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A1200 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 13-Jun-2011 12:56:24
#56 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 5-May-2003
Posts: 3087
From: Westhall, UK

@Hyperionmp

A very good response to the question. Facts and no politics or emotion to rot the question. Good stuff.

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Samurai_Crow 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 13-Jun-2011 15:13:08
#57 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 18-Jan-2003
Posts: 2320
From: Minnesota, USA

@ChrisH

Quote:

ChrisH wrote:
By "emulator" I assume you mean E-UAE.

Please don't spread mis-information: AmigaOS4 runs a lot of classic 68k software fine (e.g. Wordworth & Art Effects), and for the stuff it doesn't (usually hardware-banging games) E-UAE generally (say 90% of the time) runs them very well thank you. RunInUAE gives E-UAE an optimised configuration, and if your monitor supports 320x240 (or 320x256) then most A500 games run almost flawlessly even on a lowly Sam440 - just ask DAX

I'm not claiming that E-UAE runs everything flawlessly on a 667MHz Sam440, but IMHO it's "good enough" for many (most?) people.

I think there are a lot of reasons for wanting a NatAmi, and you don't need to bash OS4's classic compatibilty to promote NatAmi. If you don't want to be responsible for starting another pointless "MOS vs OS4" style war (everyone would be loosers), then I suggest you reconsider your NatAmi sales tactics.


It's not just OS 4's version of E-UAE, I'm bashing. I'm also bashing WinUAE and any other Amiga emulator out there. The problem with JIT-based solutions is that they spend a lot of time compiling old software into the new format. Add to that that the Copper-list functionality isn't yet mapped to the shader functionality of the underlying graphics chips and you have a problem. Finally, no version of UAE is multithreaded.

I've got an Intel Mac Mini running the version of E-UAE that already has a JIT (Intel). When I run my favorite game, Total Chaos AGA, it struggles to maintain chipset timing. The main flow of the program gets JITed but the chipset emulation strains the system immensely. If the chipset emulation could run in another thread or something, then at least the second core of my Core 2 Duo would get in on the action.

I'm one of those people that wants better performance than what the underlying OS can offer. OS 4 is a better OS than most but running hardware-banging stuff it's got a ways to go. I realize it will take time to get the Gallium 3D drivers ported so we can get Copper equivalence out of a modern graphics card.

In the meantime both the MiniMig and NatAmi teams are working to improve Classic compatibility. It hasn't escaped me that ACube produces MiniMigs as well as SAM4x0 series computers. Perhaps we can work something out.

As far as RunInUAE is concerned: it helps, but unless the underlying issues with Copper compatibility are addressed I'll be sticking with the rest of the NatAmi team. Furthermore, my OS 4 machine is/was a MicroA1-c. It will never be able to represent classic software under emulation well enough to satisfy me, PPC JiT or otherwise.

Lastly, I'm not here to bash OS 4 or MorphOS but AROS seems to be the only Amiga-like OS that can unify the Amiga-like market since it could be ported to run hosted on the others. If we could get a version of OS 4 that would put OS 3.9 to sleep on the classics, that's even better. I never thought that would be a reality though.

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pavlor 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 13-Jun-2011 15:23:40
#58 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 10-Jul-2005
Posts: 9578
From: Unknown

@Lou

Quote:
Right now, a 110Mhz '060 can probably match a 233Mhz-300Mhz PPC.


No. Sure, some applications can benefit from the faster DDR2 RAM on Natami (in comparison to CSPPC), but raw CPU speed of 604e CPUs is much higher.

68060 is not much faster per clock than original Pentium (I even assume 68060 is slower). Pentium 90 MHz scores 2.88 SpecInt95 (single core integer benchmark), 603e 300 MHz 7.5 SpecInt95 and 604e 233 MHz 9 SpecInt95.

Scores of more recent PowerPC CPUs are of course much higher:
750Cxe 600 MHz - 25.6 SpecInt95
750FX 800 MHz - 38 SpecInt95
PA6T could reach 100 SpecInt95

Quote:
Also, as the fpga gets bigger, it could contain a PPC core along with a 68k core. It's probably easier to develop a PPC core than 68k core.


Nice idea. However, CPUs like 440EP are cheap enough for possible addon cards.

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NutsAboutAmiga 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 13-Jun-2011 15:26:39
#59 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 9-Jun-2004
Posts: 12795
From: Norway

@ChrisH

ARM is bi endien, so it can theoretically run little endien and big endien code.

PowerPC too is to some extent is also bi endien, but you need to write Assembler.

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NutsAboutAmiga 
Re: Oh, boyz, it's seems that the new baby can beat them all
Posted on 13-Jun-2011 17:09:34
#60 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 9-Jun-2004
Posts: 12795
From: Norway

@Samurai_Crow

Having AmigaOS4 for 68k makes senses, because it gives 68k programers the possibility to use modern API's like AmigaInput and Reaction, closing the gab between the old and the new.

On the other hand having the possibility to run AmigaOS4 on WinUAE/PC, enables makes its easier to work whit cross compilers, because you can test on same computer.

The biggest problem is piracy.

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