@Samurai_Crow

Quote:

Mattathias BASIC will be using shaders on the non-classic Amiga hardware to simulate some features on the Amiga chipset that were never abstracted into a library. Wouldn't this be better than always having to use custom hardware?

Cooool!

/off thread on

Any info or progress update?

/off thread off


BTW we need a modern hardware. The Radeon M9 support shaders, can't remember what level.

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@Lou
Quote:

The AoC (Amiga on a card) would be strictly for backwards compatibility.

Forgot to ask: Don't you think that at this moment in time (having cheap 3 Ghz quad core processors available) it wouldn't be easier/cheaper to just dedicate one core to AGA emulation if needed? You only need original speed and 256 Colours anyway when using it with "hardware banging" applications...

The AoC surely would have been handy on a 1 GHz PC but now?

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@Thread
Regarding the whole graphics issue, we want to be able to run classic games/demos/apps, so AGA is a given, but why not do something interesting with it? I'm thinking multi-core AGA, which is possible if the single core design is already in FPGA form. That way we give ourselves backwards compatibility as well as more power moving forward.

You could even use multi-core AGA to enhance existing titles too, through the use of anti-aliasing, which would make programs look more crisp.

In any case, lets see how the Natami project progresses and stop making ridiculous demands on what it should and should not be. If you want your own personal Amiga dream machine built become a hardware engineer and do it yourself.

@HenryCase

>>In any case, lets see how the Natami project progresses and stop making ridiculous demands on what it should and should not be. If you want your own personal Amiga dream machine built become a hardware engineer and do it yourself.

That's a bit harsh isn't it? We are not making ANY ridiculous demands as you call them, we are just discussing, you know, in a democratic way, this is a forum after all, to find out what the options are, putting ideas out in the open, I think you need a camomile drink!

I don't believe you have just said that after coming out with the idea of and quote: "multi-core AGA" then quickly telling everyone off for discussing possible options! What the...

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Ok, this might be a cool addon for my C-One.

But i don't get it. If it's running only from that little board on the picture. I think a lot more chips are needed.

@TheDaddy
Yep, I definitely need a camomile drink!

I know we're just discussing hardware ideas here, but I've seen discussions like these before. Starts off well with 'wouldn't it be cool if platform x could do this?', and slowly degrades into 'i'll only buy it if it can do this', even if the feature being discussed was never part of the original specification.

Natami is a great project, and it would be awesome if we did get Amiga compatible hardware that was more powerful than an A4000. However, please realise this is the work of one man, and no matter how talented an engineer Thomas is we are asking for too much, especially from the first revision of the design. So lets support the Natami project by discussing its benefits in the present (with released specification information), and dream of the future only when we have something we can hold in our hands.

@HenryCase

The truth is, I'd probably buy one even with the currently-planned specs. If he added the other features in a later model, those extra features would be a bonus, but the lack of same wouldn't be a deal-killer.

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@NomadOfNorad
Well as long as that's understood, let's carry on dreaming!

In addition to multi-core AGA, it would be great, as others have mentioned, to have a 3D accelerator. One option would be something similar to this:
http://www.vincent3d.com/software/ogles2/ogles2.html
It's an FPGA implementation of OpenGL 2.0. Using this, we write new 3d apps to take advantage of OpenGL acceleration. The best part is when we want to upgrade our accelerator we use a more powerful FPGA (performance is increasing all the time) and with only minimal rewrites of drivers we have a brand new accelerator that would still run all the programs we created for the old accelerator.

It wouldn't be as fast as the newest NVIDIA and ATi boards but it would be easily maintanable and give 3D a much needed boost. It would also help with porting games from other platforms.

@HenryCase

That specification is for OpenGL ES 2.0 not OpenGL 2.0 . The ES stands for embedded systems. That means it's been cleaned up a bit and some of the older source codes won't work with it. Don't let that scare you though, since the PlayStation 3 uses the OpenGL-ES APIs in its devkit also.

@AmigaBlitter

Quote:

AmigaBlitter wrote: @Samurai_Crow Quote: Mattathias BASIC will be using shaders on the non-classic Amiga hardware to simulate some features on the Amiga chipset that were never abstracted into a library. Wouldn't this be better than always having to use custom hardware? Cooool! /off thread on Any info or progress update? /off thread off BTW we need a modern hardware. The Radeon M9 support shaders, can't remember what level.

The AROS versions will probably come out before the AmigaOS 3 version since the compiler backend we are working with (LLVM) doesn't support the old 680x0 or Coldfire processors yet.

@Samurai_Crow
I did think that ES stood for embedded systems, but I was hoping this was referring to embedded systems being able to use the chip, I didn't know it was a different OpenGL specification. My mistake. How much work would be involved in porting an OpenGL 2.0 program to OpenGL ES 2.0? Weeks of rewriting code?

To clarify, this is the sort of 3d accelerator implementation we could use:
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~hes2/

Last edited by HenryCase on 19-Jan-2008 at 02:05 AM.

To be honest I got a bit confused that some people were asking for PCIe.
I can understand that people want something to extent the GFX capabilities.
But I would NOT want to have an AMIGA using a GFX card over PCIe and I can tell you why.

I think I have explained Thomas AGA CHIPSET correctly, sorry for that.
Some points might have been lost in translation as well.

If we recall how the Amiga was designed then we see that the AMIGA design always
was that chipram is fast to acces from the CPU.

The Amiga chipram always was so fast that you could put a program in chip mem.
This is something that you would not want to try in the PC world.

Amiga programs and demos could always do direct access to chipram.
Program could fast read or writing byte/word/longwords without any problems.

On the PC world you had GFX card in expansion slots. The protocol (Bus abitation) in the Slot did introduce a delay. While the memory of the PC GFX card might had a response time of 65 ns only,
the PCI abitration would increase this a lot!

This is even much worse with PCIe. PCIe runs a propocol. The memory on the GFX card might have a response time of 55 ns only but in addition to this you have several hundred NS protocol overhead.


In contrast to this the Natami will continue this desing idea the original Amiga.
The Natami chip set is designed to complete a READ or WRITE cycle in maximum 10 ns.
A MAXIMUM time of 10 ns is very very F A S T !

For comparision:
The Natami chipram is faster than the 1st Level cache of the 68060 CPU.
The Natami chipram is faster than the 2nd Level cache of your x86, PPC or CELL CPU
The Natami chipram is magnitudes faster than the fast mem of the AONE.
The Natami chipram is faster than ANY memory ever used for a PC or GFX card.

I think that I did explained this badly before.
10ns is a guaranteed responsetime for minimum 100Mhz!
In the PC world people always talk about the opposite,
they don't talk about the maximum to complete an acces but about the minimum time for a single access in a long bursts.
When they call Memory for exmaple "DDR 800"
Then 800 means that this memory can transmit 1 word in 800 MHz in a burst.
But the first word access which has to open the page and initiation the burst etc runs in 20 MHz, is clear isn't it?

In real world something is always bottlenecked by the slowest parts of it not by the fastest.
Because of the The Natami uses real fast mem to limit this bottleneck.

To be frank using this fast memory for the chipmem is a dirty trick.
Thomas wants to get good performance for the Natami.
But he will never have the money to create AGA++ ASICS running at 500 Mhz.
To get performance he has to cheat and he simply buys performance by using crazily fast memory.
Memory which is normally used for building 3rd level cache of big POWER CPUs.


Personally, I don't think that a PCIe card will fit well into the AMIGA architecture.
The PCIe bus is serial and uses a protocol comparable to ethernet.

On Amiga if you wanted to READ 1 Byte of chipmem and then write back that Byte - you could always do this, and it was always fast.
With PCIe you can totally forget about this.
PCIe GFX card has a typical latency of 200 ns just for the protocol.
GFX Card and memory latency comes in addition to this.

For random access the Natami CHIPMEM is at least 30 times faster than the fastest PCIe GFXCard.

And PCIe is costly!
An FPGA softcore uses easely 10,000 logic cells.
Instead of this you can put a quite decent 3D core into the FPGA.



Cheers
Gunnar

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@BigGun

Thanks for the explanations and really interesting but that create another questions

- The natami allready made your explanations or It's a futur project from the natami author ???

- What happened to the P96 screenmodes allready used with my voodoo3/mediator ??? (allready exist on the AGA+++).

I'm not asked about speed and resolution because with your explanations, much speeder than a resolution on a PC with PCIe GFX card (but It's hard to imagine).

- What about a bounty for helping the author ??? The author just need a guy for a new internet site only ???

also:

- When the natami will be showed again (there is no something around march-see that on a no english site but maybe a mistake).

Last edited by Mrodfr on 19-Jan-2008 at 10:04 AM.
Last edited by Mrodfr on 19-Jan-2008 at 10:03 AM.

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@BigGun

>>To be honest I got a bit confused that some people were asking for PCIe.
I can understand that people want something to extent the GFX capabilities.
But I would NOT want to have an AMIGA using a GFX card over PCIe and I can tell you why.

Fair enough.

>>If we recall how the Amiga was designed then we see that the AMIGA design always was that chipram is fast to acces from the CPU.
The Amiga chipram always was so fast that you could put a program in chip mem.
This is something that you would not want to try in the PC world.
Amiga programs and demos could always do direct access to chipram.
Program could fast read or writing byte/word/longwords without any problems.
On the PC world you had GFX card in expansion slots. The protocol (Bus abitation) in the Slot did introduce a delay. While the memory of the PC GFX card might had a response time of 65 ns only,
the PCI abitration would increase this a lot!
This is even much worse with PCIe. PCIe runs a propocol. The memory on the GFX card might have a response time of 55 ns only but in addition to this you have several hundred NS protocol overhead.
In contrast to this the Natami will continue this desing idea the original Amiga.
The Natami chip set is designed to complete a READ or WRITE cycle in maximum 10 ns.
A MAXIMUM time of 10 ns is very very F A S T !

Ok then, based on that it makes sense, so how much Chip Ram could we have? The maximum amount of Chip Ram?

>>Personally, I don't think that a PCIe card will fit well into the AMIGA architecture.
The PCIe bus is serial and uses a protocol comparable to ethernet.

Ok let's forget the PCI-Express exapnsion slot for graphics card then. So what is the fastest AGA chipset configuration we would be able to achieve? What kind of screenmodes, colour depth?

>>Instead of this you can put a quite decent 3D core into the FPGA.

It would be nice to have some decent 3D chip in there somewhere. But I am still thinking that basically you will have to develop a new motherboard once the limits of the AGA++ are reached. As long as the new AGA gives out a good 2D and 3D performance with good 16bit stereo sound, USB 2.0, gigabit ethernet I am not going to moan.

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@Mrodfr

Quote:

Mrodfr wrote: @BigGun Thanks for the explanations and really interesting but that create another questions - The natami allready made your explanations or It's a futur project from the natami author ???

Thomas is working on the Natami new developer boards now. (To be done in summer)
I will state what I understood from his design goals for this board.

Quote:

- What happened to the P96 screenmodes allready used with my voodoo3/mediator ??? (allready exist on the AGA+++).

I'm not sure if I understand the question 200%. But I'll try to answer:
AFAIK The AGA++ does support the original AGA screenmodes with some enhancements as:
Automatic scandoubler for all PAL/NTSC modes to use a regular PC monitor. (Disabled for TV-Out)
Additional CHUNKY, HI-Color Truecolor modes.
Cookie-Cut Blitter support for CHUNKY, HI-Color und TRUECOLOR pixel modes.
Blitting Bobs using cookie-cut needs less CHIP memory and is twice as fast as Planar Amiga mode at the same clock.
Blitter is twice as wide and 30 times higher clocked than Amiga original blitter.
Using cookie cut the Natami has about 120 times higher bob copy performance than orig Blitter.
(If I'm calculating this coprrectly?)
Screenmode up to SuperHires non interlaced (1280x1024) with Overscan supported (1440x ???)



Quote:

I'm not asked about speed and resolution because with your explanations, much speeder than a resolution on a PC with PCIe GFX card (but It's hard to imagine).

It think, speed has several meanings: This can make it a little bit confusing. :-\
- Some people might think of a designed drug by the name speed.
- On the Amiga we might think about something taking little time.
- Or you might think of doing a lot in a fixed time.

The problem us remaining Amiga fans have is that NO ONE of us has the million Dollars to be able to create a AGA compatible chipset which will be able to run at a higher performance than todays PC chipsets. So if you want the most highest clocked GFX card - You should buy a PC and use Windows !!

Nevertheless, the AMIGA can pull some tricks to compensate for the lack of clockspeed.
- Copper and Blitter can do tricks like pulling down screen without the need to copy!
- On 2D applications you can scroll for FREE on Amiga while you have to copy the whole Screen on the PC for this.
- Amiga sprite support reduces the need for restoring the screen blitting a lot.
Depending on the setup, the PC the mouse pointer can trash the screen and requires constans redrawing of it. On Amiga this is not needed.

Tha Natami pulls a very effective but expensive trick by using the fastest RAM on earth that no one else uses besides mainframe manufactures.

3D texture mapping is more difficult and not the Card manufactures will not tell you everything
All these number of pixel drawn numbers they give are always for the bets base (with no rotation needed!)
But if a texture is not 90 degree on the screen you can not get thees numbers on the PC becuse your card can no burst anymore.
If the texture is rotated (which it always is in real live gaming the you can either burst on reading and write in some angle line. Or you read in an angle and combine writes.

Either way you do it : The theoretical very high performance of the high clocked memory on your PC GFX card can not be used properly.

Its clear that a selfmade chipset as the Natami can never get the same clockspeed of several hundreds of MHZ. (At least not with todays FPGA)
But Thomas pulls the trick to use memory which always has zero latency.
So reading wand writing is always as max speed.

Example:
With DDR3 1000 Memory:
Memory you have a access latency of around 55 NS + 1 NS per burst read.
Lets say you burst 1 Amiga cache line (4 lwords)
Time needed 55+3*1 = 58 NS
Natami needs 10 +4 NS for this = 40 NS
The winner is Natami!

If you blit a 3D texture your GFX Card blitter can read single pixels but can combine writes.
Single reads will usually have the full access latency each.
Even is clocked lower the Natami competes very well.

But it depends on the Benchmark of course.
There are many situations were the Natami is faster and there are many situations the other way around.

On the AMIGA the CPU could easely write in CHIP MEM and set pixels.
On the PC you can NOT do this!
If you try to do this on PCIe then your performance will be much slower than A500.

If you have a PCIe GFX and want to set pixels with the CPU then you need to create the whole frame in mainmemory and then copy the whole frame to the GFXcard.
On the Amiga you do not need this extra copy of the frame.


Quote:

- What about a bounty for helping the author ??? The author just need a guy for a new internet site only ???

Yes, a helping hand to create a good looking webpages with pictures and information would be good.
As soon as the Dev-Board are ready Thomas will need help of Amiga developers for creating drivers for PCI cards.

Quote:

also: - When the natami will be showed again (there is no something around march-see that on a no english site but maybe a mistake).

Thomas is working on the new dev-board now.
My guess is that this summer they should be ready for using.


Gunnar

Last edited by BigGun on 19-Jan-2008 at 11:38 AM.

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@BigGun

Could you please, based on your knowledge summurise the specs?
A yes/no would do

CPU
CPU slot (for future upgrades?)
PCI slots?
Graphics, max res. colour depth, 3D?
Sound, channels? 16bit?
Gigabit Ethernet?
USB2.0?
Firewire?
onboard memory?
Chip
Fast Max?
Serial port?
Parallel port?
ATX or micro atx size?
Power supply? ATX brick?
Floppy disk drive? Capacity?
IDE controller? Speed?
SCSI?
SATA?
Video out?
joystick?
Mouse? USB, PS2 types?

Many thanks.
I hope to see some photos and more infos soon.

Keep up the good work.

_________________
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@BigGun

Well you have AGA is planar graphics so 8 bits graphics is 1bit on 8 bytes,

thats 8 write operations to set one single pixel
(10ns * 8 = 80ns)

PC gfx cards might have more latency but uses chunky graphics one 8 bit pixel equals 8 bits on 1 byte.
(56ns * 1 = 56ns)

As any one can see planar graphics is dated, and only really fast from 1 plan to 4 plans (64 colors).

Well as we all know modern graphics cards are organized in 16bits in little endien, resulting pixels being swapped, and on hi resolutions colors like RED / GREEN / BLUE are swapped.

on 16bit thats normally ok if you read and write 16bits, same whit 32bit (Alfa,Red,Green,blue), but on 24bit you have an odd number of bytes r,g,b, so you can't read and write a pixels in one single operation.

so whit PC graphics cards 8 and 24 bit sucks.

Typical 8 bit on bigendien CPU, whit PC graphics card.
videomem[y*scanlinewidth + (x xor 1) ] = color.

Typical 24 bit
videomem[y*scanlinewidth + ((x+0) xor 1) ] = B.
videomem[y*scanlinewidth + ((x+1) xor 1) ] = G.
videomem[y*scanlinewidth + ((x+2) xor 1) ] = R.

PowerPC 32bit (ARGB) -> Intel 32bit (BGRA) -> Intel (Graphic memory) 2 x 16bit (GB) (AR)
So 32bit Bigenden (ARGB) ends up as (GBAR) thats the problem.

it might be that an FPGA graphic card might be faster too use because we avoid the all Graphic conversions.
even so I pretty amassing how well AmigaOS4 handles all this considering that Bitmaps are all in ARGB, while videomemory is always GBAR.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 19-Jan-2008 at 12:06 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 19-Jan-2008 at 12:03 PM.

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@TheDaddy

Quote:

TheDaddy wrote: @BigGun Could you please, based on your knowledge summurise the specs? A yes/no would do

Yes sure.
But with no guarantee.
I have seen the SPEC and his board but can't answer all.

For the next dev board, the goal is :

Quote:

CPU CPU slot (for future upgrades?)

Yes CPU-slot.
The first DEV-Boards will have a 68060 CPU to allow easier debugging.
Thomas has AMIGA 4000 with 68060 - so if something is not working as expected he can easely compare it on the A4000.
When the FPGA on the board is fully checked another CPU Card using a new CPU will be made.

Possible CPUs include:
- Coldfire
- PPC (maybe CELL)

Quote:

PCI slots?

Yes. PCI slots

Quote:

Graphics, max res. colour depth, 3D?

AMIGA Superhires overscan. This was 1440x1024 (wasn't it? - Gee don't recall)
Truecolor
3D - Texture mapper with ALPHA, Mipmapping and Antialiasing.

Quote:

Sound, channels? 16bit?

Pauly supporting old Amigal mode of
4 times 8bit sample x 6 bit volume
and new AGA ++ mode
4 times 16bit sample x 8 bit volume

Quote:

Gigabit Ethernet?

Of course with Ethernet.
Without a computer is quite pointless today.
I'm know whether ETH-100 or Gigabit.
Personally I think 100 is more than enough for surfing the internet but you should ask Thomas this.
But there are PCI slots.


Quote:

USB2.0?

USB yes - I did not ask for 1.0 or 2.0

Quote:

Firewire?

No not on board.
But there are PCI slots.

Quote:

onboard memory? Chip

8-32 MB very fast CHIP MEM was the idea, I think.

Quote:

Fast Max?

I think the 68060 CPU card should mave 512 MB.

Quote:

Serial port?

YES

Quote:

Parallel port?

YES

Quote:

ATX or micro atx size?

Don't know. I did not pay attention to this.

Quote:

Power supply? ATX brick?

Quote:

Don't know. I did not pay attention to this. [quote] Floppy disk drive? Capacity?

Amiga HD disks

Quote:

IDE controller? Speed?

IDE Amiga OS compatible. Speed don't know.
Thomas explained how he made the chip A1200 IDE compatible
and as well supporting faster IDE modes too but I don't understood nor recall the details :-/

Quote:

SCSI?

Don't think so.
But there are PCI slots.

Quote:

SATA?

Don't think so.
Thomas explained to us in technical details about SATA specs and
that is no real performance benefit of SATA today. So I thibk the board will come with IDE.
But there are PCI slots.

Quote:

Video out?

Yes

Quote:

joystick?

Yes, Amiga compatible
Thomas was proud of supporting both old and new devices.

Quote:

Mouse? USB, PS2 types?

Both Amiga and USB/PS2

Quote:

Many thanks. I hope to see some photos and more infos soon. Keep up the good work.

Cheers

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@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

NutsAboutAmiga wrote: @BigGun Well you have AGA is planar graphics so 8 bits graphics is 1bit on 8 bytes, thats 8 write operations to set one single pixel (10ns * 8 = 80ns) PC gfx cards might have more latency but uses chunky graphics one 8 bit pixel equals 8 bits on 1 byte. (56ns * 1 = 56ns)

Yes PC GFX card has advantages over old AGA in some points.

But Natami has AGA++
AGA ++ supports both planer and CHUNKY modes.
You can use Chunky mode on Natami with setting 8/16 or 32bit pixel for 10 NS on Natami.

Quote:

On old AGA mode if you wnat to set a single pixel you would need a bit set (which is read +write operation) So with old Amiga chipset this is 8 x read + 8 x write (80ns * 8 *2 = 1280 ns) On a CyberGFX card you could get this with one write. (Which would be ZORRO delay + 80ns) On a PCIe card you will get this for: PCI overhead + memlatency + access (200 NS + 55ns + 1 = 256 ns) On the NATAMI you will get this for (10 ns) ! [quoe] As any one can see planar graphics is dated, and only really fast from 1 plan to 4 plans (64 colors). Well as we all know modern graphics cards are organized in 16bits in little endien, resulting pixels being swapped, and on hi resolutions colors like RED / GREEN / BLUE are swapped.

Yes, chunky with correct endian setting has nice advantages over Planar.
This is why AGA++ supports both planar and chunky.
AGA++ gives you the best of both.
Free smooth AMIGA scrolling compared with simple to blit chunky modes.

And Natami has of course CORRECT ENDIAN CHIPMEM !
So there is no color swapping needed of course


You are right that using PC GFX chips in AMIGA big endian world is problematic.
On little endian GFX chips the pixels might by swapped because of endian.

And as you said correctly the FPGA Natami chipse as many advantages over on little endian PC GFX chip. You save one endian conversion of the whole screen per frame.


Cheers
Gunnar

Last edited by BigGun on 19-Jan-2008 at 12:26 PM.
Last edited by BigGun on 19-Jan-2008 at 12:22 PM.

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@BigGun

>>The first DEV-Boards will have a 68060 CPU to allow easier debugging.

So what are the end users expected to see, a Coldfire or PPC (Cell would be amazing!) minimum?
This is cool!

>>AMIGA Superhires overscan. This was 1440x1024 (wasn't it? - Gee don't recall)
Truecolor
3D - Texture mapper with ALPHA, Mipmapping and Antialiasing.

This sounds good! ;)

>>8-32 MB very fast CHIP MEM was the idea, I think.

32MB Chip Ram? WOW! Yep the motherboard should come with 32MB Chip!!!

>>I think the 68060 CPU card should mave 512 MB.

I presume a Coldfire or PPC (Cell) card could host more?

>>Serial/parallel?
YES

A better/faster version than the ones found on classic Amigas?

>>Amiga HD disks
Would this allow to use pc floppies like the catweasel?

>>Video Out YES

Would this support HDTV?

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