@utri007

Quote:

@DJBase I don't see any announcements here, just information for something what some hobbyists are trying to do. I feel shame because someones attitude

Pardon? I don't have anything against NatAmi.

_________________
Amiga 1200 | Vampire 1200 II | 128 MB RAM | Indivision AGA Mk3 | A314-cp | 2x128 GB CF | AmigaOS 3.2.2
AmigaOne X1000 | 1.8 GHz | 4 GB RAM | Radeon R7 250X | 250 GB SATA SSD | AmigaOS 4.1

Quote:

CodeSmith wrote: I would like to suggest that the developer offer a version with a fast 68040 as well, because the price-performance ratio of the '060 is not as good (the '060 is definitely faster than the '040, but the price difference is greater than the perf difference).

Used PGA 68060's can be picked up for about $50 if you know where to look. Provide an empty PGA socket and a socketed oscillator and keep the price down. Some Amiga users like me already have spare 68060's sitting around too. The 68060 is more over clockable and only requires 3.3 V where the 68040 needs 5 V. The 68060 is about twice as fast as a 68040 at the same clock speed in real world applications. It's a pretty good design and reasonably useful after it is clocked up and has fast memory. I use a CS MK3 with 68060@80MHz with 50ns SIMMs and a Voodoo 4 to create a snappy usable machine. It's more responsive than a several GHz Pentium 4 with Winslows. Still not fast enough to run this game though . I'll probably buy a Natami if the price and features are right. A non-bottlenecked PCI bus, standard tower fit and power supply, built in flicker fixer, AGA+ with compatibility, almost everything flash upgradeable, and tons of super fast memory would make this a pretty fun and interesting machine indeed. The planar/transparency and sprites on top of chunky 3D displays could allow for graphics that are not easily accomplished on newer GFX boards anyway. We really need some of the OS and Warp3D updated to keep everything from becoming one big hack though. Still it would be something new, exciting and useful in Amiga land.

@matthey

Quote:

Used PGA 68060's can be picked up for about $50 if you know where to look. Provide an empty PGA socket and a socketed oscillator and keep the price down

Yes, adding a socket would be the most flexible, but my understanding is that sockets can get expensive (the EEs here are free to tell me I'm full of it ). My comment was meant for less hardcore amigans who may want a cheaper "plug in and go solution", don't have an old CPU in a cardboard box somewhere, and don't want to bother hunting down relatively hard to find CPUs on eBay.

Quote:

A non-bottlenecked PCI bus, standard tower fit and power supply, built in flicker fixer, AGA+ with compatibility, almost everything flash upgradeable, and tons of super fast memory would make this a pretty fun and interesting machine indeed. The planar/transparency and sprites on top of chunky 3D displays could allow for graphics that are not easily accomplished on newer GFX boards anyway.

That is exactly what attracts me to the NatAmi, it may not be a "serious" box by todays standards, but it's got plenty of juice to do a lot of interesting stuff and some of the things it can natively do would be a pain in the !@#$ to do on a modern x86 box.

Quote:

CodeSmith wrote: Yes, adding a socket would be the most flexible, but my understanding is that sockets can get expensive (the EEs here are free to tell me I'm full of it ).

I'm sure the socket isn't too cheap but have you priced *NEW* 68060s? They are several hundred dollars a piece unless bought in large quantities. The NatAmi would have to outsell the AmigaOne by a bunch to get a good quantity discount. Used PGA 68060's could probably be bought in quantity and pre-installed for NatAmi purchasers. There are plenty of chip recycler places around and I would imagine some have 68060's available.

@Hans

Maybe producing the board with socketed 040s and optionally 060 it would reduce the cost a bit. Also 040 isn't as bad, why not to use it? but that's just one idea.

I'd welcome if the official site could be updated more often, with photos, tests, roadmap, etc. BTW

Reynolds

Quote:

Maybe Amiga Forever will be included in the price.

AmigaForever ROMS are encrypted. And anyway, I doubt the licence lets you use/repackage the ROM with another product...

Oh, is this that easy to get an OS3 licence ? because excluding Cloanto (and they obtained it years ago... back when Petro was there iirc), who has got a licence right now ?

I don't think anything will be "easy" with current owners...

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Okay one more last reply

@wegster
Regarding Thomas, Thomas is fully focusing on development.
For Thomas its much more important to get the Natami finished this Summer than
updating the website or explaining things in a forum.
I think this makes good sense.
Any hours spend in a forum is not productive.



Regarding the AONE G3 vs 68060.

The Rev 6 of the 68060 CPU runs reliable at 100 Mhz.
There are ATARI upgrade cards using 100MHz 68060.

Even if you do not use SRAM but "slow" normal SDRAM as fast memory,
the 68060 is able to do 10 Million random Cacheline burst read per second.
(Timing: 2 clocks CacheMiss + 5 clocks 1st word + 111 burst)

Thanks to the Articia, the AONE with 800MHz G3 can only do 6 Million Cacheline burst reads per second.
And even if the the cache line read are fully sequential the AONE can only do 6 Million per second!

The cache line of the G3 is twice is long as the 68060 (32byte vs 16byte)
If your algorithm can make usage of all the bytes in the cacheline
than the AONE G3 is 20% faster than the 68060.

A Raycaster or Voxel engine is an interesting mix of Mathematical operations
and a lot of memory reads.

The problem with the nature of a Raycast, or Voxel algorithm makes it impossible to use all the bytes in the cache line. Typically your cacheline burst will be able to make usage of 2 points per fetch.
This means for the algorithm that I use, the long cache line of the G3 is of no advantage at all.
Or in other words the 68060 is 50% faster than the AONE G3 is this routine.

Its clear that the there are other areas where the G3 will beat the much slower clocker 68060.
But Voxel algorithms are not easy do use effectively with modern CPUs.
Todays CPUs are fast, and increase their memory throughput by doing long burst.
But the nature of the Raycasting /Voxel algorithm can not really use these long bursts.

Using a softrenderer the 68060 will beat the AONE G3 by 50%
When you let the 68060 do only halve the work and let the AGA texture engine
do the other halve then the Natami does beats the AONE hands down.

Regading OS3.
There is no need for you to speculate about this.
We have enough legal OS 3 licenses for the Natami.

Last edited by BigGun on 07-Mar-2008 at 08:51 AM.
Last edited by BigGun on 07-Mar-2008 at 08:49 AM.

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APOLLO the new 68K : www.apollo-core.com

@BigGun

Everything sounds great!

But I would like to see some screenshots of Total Chaos AGA running on the NatAmi to prove that it is really compatible with OS3.x AGA software.

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Total Chaos AGA

@BigGun

Thanks for posting (even though Im not a software/hardware guy....more of an Amiga user) I really appreciate any info for this board which I am looking forward to purchasing!

I just wonder how much work it would take to run OS3.9 on this?

_________________
Live Long and keep Amigaing!

A1200, Power Tower, TF1260 128MB RAM, 68060 Rev 6, OS3.9 BB2, HD-Floppy, Mediator TX+ PCI, Voodoo 3 3000, Soundblaster 4.1, TV Card, Spider USB, 100MBit Ethernet, 16GB CF HD, 52xCDRom.

Still, at a price of $700 or $800, the NatAmi is cheap. Especially compared to some HW that you cannot buy. I know the NatAmi is not available yet, nad might never be.. But if or when, then it seems like the very best approach.

Also, I really don't like the current amiga idea of adding HW on added HW on yet more added HW, that is added on an A1200 from 1993.

If you compare the price on the Mnimig with a price gues of $800, you still get a lot for your money..

Last edited by Yssing on 07-Mar-2008 at 11:28 AM.

_________________

@BigGun

ATI's TrueForm from R8500 should be able to create smooth surfaces

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@BigGun

Quote:

But the nature of the Raycasting /Voxel algorithm can not really use these long bursts.

Depends on the CPU architecture. Refer to streaming pre-fetch instructions and data front-end engines, large 3MB/4MB/6MB L2 caches and (multiple instructions and data in-flight) pipelining in modern processors. AMD Phenom, Intel Itanium and Intel Core 2 prefetch both instructions and data sets.

My CpuID's PrefMonitor' shows very little cache misses while rendering a picture in Cinebench R10 on my C2D Merom-4MB L2.

GPU Raycast water at interactive framerates that extends into infinity. Only requires pixel-shader 2 hardware e.g. ATI R3x0, R4x0.
http://www.graphicsdev.net/main/node/40

Last edited by Hammer on 07-Mar-2008 at 12:27 PM.

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Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 32 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@BigGun

Quote:

The problem with the nature of a Raycast, or Voxel algorithm makes it impossible to use all the bytes in the cache line

Experimental Voxel Engine with CPU demo and CUDA 1.1 demo
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=465985

My CpuID's PrefMonitor' shows very little cache misses, cache success rate @~91-to-93 percent while running this experimental voxel engine.

More Voxel Engine with source code
http://www.advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm

Voxel in modern games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel
Note that PC's Crysis uses voxel for it's terrain system. Refer to geometry amplification techniques in DX8, DX9/OpenGL2.0 and DX10/OpenGL2.1 GPUs.

More voxel terrain with (MS VC++) source code
http://www.codermind.com/articles/Voxel-terrain-engine-beautification-features.html

Last edited by Hammer on 07-Mar-2008 at 01:10 PM.
Last edited by Hammer on 07-Mar-2008 at 12:58 PM.
Last edited by Hammer on 07-Mar-2008 at 12:54 PM.
Last edited by Hammer on 07-Mar-2008 at 12:43 PM.

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Amiga 500 (rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

Perhaps we can convince some entrepenuer to buy a suffecient quantity of '060s and sell them for a mild mark-up in order to lower the overall costs...?

Can someone point me to a website where they can be purchased both as single units and quantity?

I found this:
http://www.newark.com/48F4454/semiconductors-prototyping/product.us0?sku=FREESCALE-SEMICONDUCTOR-MC68EC060RC50.
75MHz, 110MIPS, 5v

Price doesn't seem so bad unless you compare it to an AMD X2...

Here's one new 66MHz going for $30
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270189946006

Last edited by Lou on 07-Mar-2008 at 01:46 PM.
Last edited by Lou on 07-Mar-2008 at 01:42 PM.

Quote:

My CpuID's PrefMonitor' shows very little cache misses, cache success rate @~91-to-93 percent while running this experimental voxel engine.

What you say is only correct for a LOW DETAIL and LOW QUALITY case.
Only if you go for low detail the CPU can cache the data.

But the Natami algorithm works with a high details and high quality.
Its impossible to cache this amount of data!

If you think you an do better with WinUAE or Picasso then how about demo competition?
Write me and we can discuss the rules.
If you want then I can send you the 64MB data source file needed to render 1 sector of the map.

If you want not only to argue but want to help improving the architecture and/or the demos feel free to contact me too.

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@BigGun

Quote:

BigGun wrote: Thanks to the Articia, the AONE with 800MHz G3 can only do 6 Million Cacheline burst reads per second. And even if the the cache line read are fully sequential the AONE can only do 6 Million per second!

Interesting. Can you tell me how you determined this? Even better, is there some source code for a benchmark program that I could use on my A1 to test this?

Hans

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@Hans

Quote:

Quote: BigGun wrote: Thanks to the Articia, the AONE with 800MHz G3 can only do 6 Million Cacheline burst reads per second. And even if the the cache line read are fully sequential the AONE can only do 6 Million per second! Interesting. Can you tell me how you determined this? Even better, is there some source code for a benchmark program that I could use on my A1 to test this? Hans

This is all old news and quite off-topic here.

I did some extensive benchmarking on several PowerPC and CELL platforms.
You will find results and some test tools on my home page.
http://www.greyhound-data.com/gunnar/glibc/

Based on my tests, I have added some performance enhancements to Linux Kernel
and to the GNU GLibc. These improvements where discussed on www.PowerDeveloper.org.
Recently some of the patches were accepted into GLIBC.

In short, I added speed up for G2/G3/G4 and G5 and CELL.
My CELL memcpy patch did improved performance by 400%.

Unfortunately the AONE is a rather sad case, as the Articia is crippling it.
If you have more questions please email.

Regards

_________________
APOLLO the new 68K : www.apollo-core.com

@BigGun

Quote:

This is all old news and quite off-topic here.

Yes this is off-topic, but thanks for the link.

Hans

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http://hdrlab.org.nz/ - Amiga OS 4 projects, programming articles and more. Home of the RadeonHD driver for Amiga OS 4.x project.
https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.

Regarding the 24 Bit Paula

All these specs seems like a dream. Why not make the new Paula ASIO compatible? Maybe we'll get a Cubase port then Amiga will be superior in every possible way than Atari :) (Also USB2.0, firewire and a midi port) :D

hello,

the interesting thing for me for the natami is the speed. we see the natami on the show on january on picture with all the little red connexion and the 68030
and next summer a first batch with 68060 will be maybe available !!!!.

That will be verry great and verry good the hardware developper seemed to be a god for the amiga harwdare.

I really hope to see a PPC with Ghz on the board for the AOS4.0 OS.

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-A1200+Mediator+VooDoo3+060/50+96mo+SCSI-KIT
-SAM440EP-667mhz-on MapowerKC3000+AOS4.1

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