@Arko

Well, they tried the idea of software emulation and ended up scrapping it. Whether this was because it's not possible or if it just means they're fiddling at too low a level in the OS hasn't been clarified to me.

The next logical step if the e500v2 doesn't cut it is the e500mc which does have the classic FPU (albeit at half speed compared to the core). Unfortunately those are only available with either 4 or 8 cores, but they are pin compatible with the 1 or 2 core 64-bit chips.

So until AOS benefits from 4 cores (or more), the 5010 seems the most logical choice.

The path seems clear to me.
Hyperion needs to:
1. Support more cores
2. Support the e500v2 so we can make cheap hardware for entry-level.

For software developers:
Once you have support for it in the math library, a recompile should make the code use whichever FPU is available, or in worst case just do it in software for those who don't have a "proper" one.

I really wish one of the Friedens would jump out of lurk mode right about now

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@olegil

Btw I have been looking QUITE a bit at the P3041/4040/4080/5010/5020 ballouts.

I did an escape routing, with traditional BGA techniques you can get away with 6 layers for the escape routing. Typically you'll want some decoupling capacitors and some signals (especially power/ground) don't fit in the mathematically perfect world of dogbone escape routing, so this would end up as an 8 layer design.

Then I used micro-vias and it honestly seems like I could do a stack like this (under the BGA, other places it might be slightly different):

GND-PSU-signal-GND-signal-PSU, which to me sounds like 6 layers. This is possible because with micro-vias you have a LOT more space on the inner layers and even the high-speed signals like PCIe aren't being crowded much.

A P3041 starts at 180USD in volumes, but thankfully doesn't need a whole lot on the outside. Lack of graphics controller is the worst, but as a basis for a board with PCIe slots it's on the whole rather a good start. AMD southbridge would help a lot as well.

Still dreaming up worlds where the Amiga crowd would agree with me to keep the number of components down to actually GET a WORKING end-result, but for now I'm just lurking around listening to the feature creeps

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@olegil

Depending of when the ultimate board is planned to go in production, T10xx might also be an option.

(to me it's still unclear what T* models will have DIU, as it's shown in block diagram but not in specs)

@damocles

Freescale is now perhaps the only one doing interesting PPC development.
Chinese are doing their own PPC R&D, but no real new info about that in any readable language.
Not sure what IBM plans for smaller Power chips, it has been more than one year since their PPC47x news and from 970 there does not seem to be any embedded version coming. Once xbox360 and/or PS3 production ends, it would be nice if they could release some embedded chip based on either of those.
APM is producing PPCs, not sure if they any more develop them (even though they already have interesting low end PPC chips that we do not yet have on our niche HW)

@thread
Found some roadmap pdf that I had not spotted before:
https://www.power.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Powerorg_paper_RTC_05_12.pdf
/me goes to read....

"Power Architecture dominates the 32/64-bit MPU market making it the number one world-wide market share leader in 32-bit MPUs and the number two world-wide market share leader in 64-bit CPUs"

I only hope that they use their income in R&D rather than fueling their business jets (CBM considered Jets to be more important).

Last edited by KimmoK on 19-Nov-2012 at 12:10 PM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 19-Nov-2012 at 11:51 AM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 19-Nov-2012 at 11:43 AM.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

Ok, Im going to ask for something totally stupid here, beause Im not looking at ultimate power, performance for cost, size, but how useful a design can be for minimum implementation.

Given memory cells are still after almost 2 decades limited to 100 Mhz or so, what would the delay, latency be on a single lane PCI Express connector, feeding a serial 64 bit data into a SERDES board into which you have your DDR parralel RAM? In other words, how much simpler can a motherboard be if you get rid of the RAM requirements off it with its immense, Slow parralel data bus?

Next, PCi Express is an expansin interface. why support anything else if you can get breakout boards cheap. I mean, include GPU? Why, a Radeon HD5450 Costs £30 over the counter. By the time any design we come up with actually esists, a GPU vastly more powerful will be the same price. Dont include things you cant support because they havent been released yet and so wont be supported because they are to old when it does.

Start with minimum. What is needed to equate to Raspberry Pi, 1 Ghz 32 bit core. then if those arent available, look at teh cheapest available, and say, well, it doesnt have such and such, but it has an IO system that allows 8 cards etc.

Amigas were designed on the philosophy of distributed design. Use it?

Oh look, lets throw everything onto one piece of code on one piece of circuitry. Hello Wintel.

_________________
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@RodTerl

Well, I agree totally with most of that except I don't understand what you mean about the memory. You want to run the system off of the graphics memory? Graphics memory is typically much faster at writing than reading (from a CPU point of view, as the read bandwidth is already taken up by the GPU).

And it's nice to have something to boot off of. I would do it with NOTHING onboard except what comes off the SoC but I understand those who insist on USB and SATA in addition to PCIe

Graphics and sound has no place in a DIY project, though

I'm not entirely certain if there are any limitations in the 18 SERDESes of the P4080 et co, but SDHC+GbE+SATA2+SATA2+PCIe x8/x4 and x1 isn't bad for a motherboard.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@RodTerl

"Given memory cells are still after almost 2 decades limited to 100 Mhz or so, what would the delay, latency be on a single lane PCI Express connector, feeding a serial 64 bit data into a SERDES board into which you have your DDR parralel RAM? In other words, how much simpler can a motherboard be if you get rid of the RAM requirements off it with its immense, Slow parralel data bus?"

Hmm... simplify design by not using RAM on board...
With modern serial buses one could manage to do system that outperfoms the memory performance of some old PPC machine.
But some chip like PA6T with built-in memory controller and 128bit 1066Mhz memory bus is anyway lightyears ahead.

"Next, PCi Express is an expansin interface. why support anything else if you can get breakout boards cheap. I mean, include GPU? Why, a Radeon HD5450 Costs £30 over the counter."

If we can use a soc chip with GPU, we can do far simpler board, mobile even, without the cost of separate GPU and it's power usage. Similar to rasberry pi.

"Start with minimum. What is needed to equate to Raspberry Pi, 1 Ghz 32 bit core. then if those arent available,"

APM has 1Ghz 32bit PPC, costs about 30eur, has a PCIex1 bus, SATA, USB, memory controller (512MB, 32bit) etc... IMHO, it's perfect for low end/entry model for 200eur system price (Efika replacement, kind of, that would include RadeonHD on PCIex1 slot)

And with 100+eur (APM) PPC you get dual core and more PCIe.
+ Hopefully, within a year some new 100-200eur PPCs from freescale are out to buy.

(in "my prices" no attempt to recover R&D cost is made, we do not have such market yet, IMO)

Last edited by KimmoK on 19-Nov-2012 at 05:51 PM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 19-Nov-2012 at 05:49 PM.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@olegil

It's not possible to support e500v2 cores because they don't have a Floating Point Unit that is compatible with existing PPCs. So none of the existing OS4 software would run on it.

@COBRA

All existing OS4 software written in C or other non-assembly languages would run just fine on e500v2 if recompiled.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@Spirantho

Quote:

It just wouldn't be economically viable to produce neat little machine like a Sam 440 if there were many less buyers than there are already today.

A Sam440 is probably even slower than a Peg1. There's nothing "neat" about Sam440, it was already slow and obsolete when it was released many years after Pegasos1&2.

I find odd supporting slow hardware that doesn't provide any advantage compared to 2003 hardware.

When AmigaOS4.x started to run on machines without custom chips it became clear that the hardware where it ran on didn't need to be obscure and could use standard off-the-shelf parts. Supporting strange vendors that milk customers with high prices and sell both slow and expensive hardware (even compared with amiga market from 8 years ago) is BAD for AmigaOS4.x. Call me when you run OS4 on a laptop half as powerful as my powerbook G4. Hyperion is supposed to be a software company and since they own AmigaOS4.x they are free to release it for any computer they want.

There's no point in supporting small companies because time has shown us that those small companies never evolve much and continue to make customers pay premium prices, don't get me wrong, it's nice small companies exist and it's ok if anybody wants to buy slow hardware from them but forcing all AmigaOS4.x users to buy obsolete hardware for premium prices is ridiculous and a bad strategy because the number of customers will be reduced to the minimum.

I don't know where did you get those numbers but MorphOS has shown the number of licenses sold increases quite a lot if you add Mac hardware to the list of supported platforms. If it had the "AmigaOS4" brand it would have probably sold various times more because Amiga brand is important for some people.

Do you really expect most classic users who feel nostalgy will spend 600€ on a "toy computer" like Sam440? A Mac is far more interesting because they cost next to nothing (some friends got theirs for free and even their 450Mhz G4 runs rings around Sam440, add 75€ for MorphOS license and you have a "NG Amiga"). Perhaps your amiga friends meet at the club with their top-hats, their eyeglasses, fire their cigars using dollars and don't care about prices but most users I know care about price and when you talk about using a cheap computer (they don't care if it's second hand or not, they are using 1992 computers!) for amiga uses and just investing a few bucks on it will probably give it a go but no one of them will ever spend 600€ just to "try it out".

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@olegil

The problem is that GCC uses float registers, so you can just replace the float instructions.

Anyway is pretty horrible idea to have to do a branch into math.library to do fmuls operation.




int main()
{
100025c: 94 21 ff f0 stwu r1,-16(r1)
1000260: 7c 08 02 a6 mflr r0
1000264: 93 e1 00 0c stw r31,12(r1)
1000268: 90 01 00 14 stw r0,20(r1)
100026c: 7c 3f 0b 78 mr r31,r1
register float test;
register float heck;
register float res;


test = 20;
1000270: 3d 20 01 00 lis r9,256
1000274: c1 a9 10 1c lfs f13,4124(r9)
heck = 40;
1000278: 3d 20 01 00 lis r9,256
100027c: c0 09 10 20 lfs f0,4128(r9)

res = test *heck;
1000280: ec 0d 00 32 fmuls f0,f13,f0

printf("%f\n",res);
1000284: 3d 20 01 00 lis r9,256
1000288: 38 69 10 18 addi r3,r9,4120
100028c: fc 20 00 90 fmr f1,f0
1000290: 4c c6 32 42 crset 4*cr1+eq
1000294: 48 00 00 1d bl 10002b0

}


What we need is some kind of runtime compiler, where you have object code translated before its executed, this way we can inject only compatible instructions, and simulate missing instructions the FPU and other instructions.

but all programs will need to be recompiled.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 20-Nov-2012 at 01:10 AM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 20-Nov-2012 at 01:09 AM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 19-Nov-2012 at 11:13 PM.

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@KimmoK

Quote:

But a new documented HW, available to buy with a warranty.

Most of amiga users I know are happy with their 20 years computers, I don't think warranties are their main cause of concern when talking about NG miggies.

Quote:

(and the HW is many ways faster than y2005 PPC HW, even if they are behind in CPU MIPS per core)

Pegasos2 is faster and was released in 2005. Mac Quad G5 is faster and was released in 2005 (btw, it has pci-express too), iMac G5, Mac Mini, powerbook, powermac MDDs even cheap iBooks are way better.

Quote:

Have they? Where? A link anywhere?

Invoke Andreas Wolf. Hyperion is free to release OS4 for whatever platform they choose yet they prefer not to do it

Quote:

If AOS4.2 would become available for (some) old Mac(s) via moana2, I doubt it would kill AOS4 HW business. It would only enable more cheap entry level HW (where full 3D acceleration, SATA2, PCIe x16, etc. never materializes). Newer, better supported HW would anyway appeal to active users.

Freedom is good: those who care so much about new hardware can buy new hardware and those who prefer to use 2nd hand G5s can have fun with them. BTW, some G5 Macs had PCIe x16 in 2005 in case someone missed it.

_________________
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@COBRA

Besides, I said P4080, that's the e500mc

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@NutsAboutAmiga

I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing, but 1: I said P4080 which is NOT e500v2 and 2: I said all programs could even run on e500v2 as long as they are in C and can be recompiled.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@olegil

well in that case you need to provide two versions of your program, one for double and one for normal FPU.

like it was normal on Demos for 680x0 CPUS.

DEMO.060
DEMO.040.FPU
DEMO.040
DEMO.030
DEMO.020.FPU
DEMO.020

etc.

Program_db_fpu.exe
program_std_fpu.exe

or you will need to strip out any decimal number and only use integer numbers.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 19-Nov-2012 at 11:37 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 19-Nov-2012 at 11:34 PM.

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@olegil

Another good thing about the mc is the hypervisor, which is like a level below supervisor when it comes to hardware (you have usermode, supervisor mode and hypervisor mode, where the two first work exactly like on m68k and the third let's you set up peripherals to be shared between different "partitions" of the system or even be dedicated to a single process).

What's cool about that is that you get a bunch of "vmware" systems essentially for free. Let's start with a 3041 which has 4 cores.

1 core boots up like normal, but enters hypervisor mode. From there it sets up each core to run a separate system, or it sets up multiple cores for an SMP OS.

I would use 1 core for AmigaOS, 1 core for an extra copy of AmigaOS, using VNC as the user-interface (so we would need AOS to boot up properly without a video card) and 2 cores for a Linux, this time with X installed so we just start an X server on the Amiga side and run whatever windows we want from the Linux side on that.

These machines would communicate either through gigabit ethernet (if you need them from the outside), or special internal bridge-devices that essentially look like ethernet (if you don't need them from the outside).

Might be good to set aside 3 GbE ports so they can all be connected to the world, but it might also not be needed. I think I remember it having 2xRGMII, so it doesn't eat up a lot of SERDESes (8+4+1+2 = 15 for the PCIe and SATA, so we have 3 to spare).

I honestly think this could be a winner. If AmigaOS starts using the second core for something sensible, just change the partitioning and reboot.

I think EVERYONE would like to have an extra machine running experimental software on OS4 plus a dual-core system running Linux in the background.

Best part: Hyperion need not worry about anything else than supporting the e500mc core itself, neither OS4 nor Linux would be allowed to go anywhere near the hypervisor instructions, that's for OUR use only

Whose in?


Edit: Later I thought it might be better to start with the 2041, sacrificing a few SERDESes (so x4 for graphics instead of x8, otherwise same idea).

Last edited by olegil on 21-Nov-2012 at 05:03 AM.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@NutsAboutAmiga

Now you're being thick on purpose. On MacOSX, they had single binaries for PPC and x86. You're saying this is MORE difficult than supporting both x86 and PPC with a single binary? Honestly.

Besides, what would be the problem? You tell the compiler to generate both, you pack both in an archive and if the wrong one is started it tells the user to use the other one.

ALSO, I am still advocating using a processor that HAS the classic FPU, albeit at half speed of the integer unit.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@olegil

Or just use the install script to pick the one thats correct for your computer.
but the OS needs to have some kind of protection agents the wrong ELF file.

I have not really compiled anything for MacOSX so I don't know the details.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

Could we get back on track? What do you think of my idea using the e500mc instead?

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@olegil

The e500mc is a good candidate, albeit I am much, much awaiting the e6500. Altivec is just a big plus.
The e500v2 I'd skip completely, no binary compability is making the situation unnecessarily uncomfortable. With the logic of recompiling each progarm and picking the appropriate binary you could better make the big jump to x86 or ARM then (not that much more hassle included).

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@olegil

Yes the e500mc core should be useable.
P2040 might be interesting is quad core chip, P2080 is 8 core ship based on e500mc.

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