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KimmoK 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 10:14:10
#241 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 14-Mar-2003
Posts: 5211
From: Ylikiiminki, Finland

@ChrisH

and the hidden image was from linux running on the dualcore CPU.
There is no other option.
The CPU is only one to get the sown result.
And the CPU is the one capable to go over 20W, xena does not have cooling, it will be below 5W chip.

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vidarh 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 11:09:25
#242 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 4-Jan-2010
Posts: 580
From: London, UK (ex-pat; originally from Norway)

@CodeSmith

Quote:
The PA6T-1682M (one of the contenders for the X1000 CPU) running at 2GHz (the rumored speed of the CPU) clocks in at 8,800 MIPS (source). That means that if Xena wasn't present, the main CPU would be able to to pick up the slack using only ~5% of itself.


That math just doesn't add up. Even AmigaOS has sufficient overhead in interrupt handling and thread scheduling that for any remotely IO intensive (and thus interrupt intensive if done on the main CPU) overheads could easily far surpass the actual processing done, while the XCore can retrieve data from IO ports (or write to them) in 1 clock cycle and continue right in the middle of the same control flow as before.

Under a general purpose OS on a general purpose CPU you either need to keep munging the interrupt entry point if you want to get even close to that (and you still won't match it) or do dynamic dispatch based on the current state (in which case you get stuck with having to decompose your code into a state machine).

With the design as stated, I'd be *shocked* if you could find workloads where even the single core XCore could offload work that'd take 20% or more of the main CPU, and I won't be surprised if we find workloads where it could do better. But the really exciting bit is the potential for eventually getting the 4 core one + expansion cards with more (they cite inter-chip message passing latencies of down to 200 nanoseconds, which gets me real excited about having a card stuffed full of them...)

Quote:
Yes, one can add more XMOS chips via the Xorro slot, but this would lead to "to run this game, you need the Individual Computers Quad Xena and clockport card". Unless this card is bundled with new X1000s, I don't see that program selling too many copies - think back to the days of A500s and FPUs: how many programs required an FPU at the time?


True, but how many programs required the trapdoor memory expansion? Lots, and lots. Eventually I didn't know anyone who had an A500 without 1MB of memory.

If Xena takes off and gets widely used, and that will depend greatly on the community, then I'd expect to see first the quad core version becoming standard on newer models, and possibly even more than one. And then you might start seeing people buying cards to bring their older models up to scratch. These chips are *cheap*, and they drop rapidly in price once you get reasonable volume.

What it boils down to is whether or not Xena gets used in any "killer apps" that can also benefit from increasing the number of cores. The FPU didn't have any killer apps that were of interest for most people at the time. I don't we can predict very well now whether Xena will.

Quote:
Simple: look at its little brother, the SAM440. It's got an FPGA on board, which as far as I can tell is still pretty much unused by the community


FPGAs, simpler than ASICs as they may be, still requires you to understand hardware design using Verilog or VHDL to get anything useful done. That's a *far* higher hurdle than needing to know C with a handful of simple extensions. That's the other thing that gets me excited about the XCore: It's simple. If you know C, you know 99% of what you need to know to be able to get programs running on one.

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DAX 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 11:14:35
#243 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 30-Sep-2009
Posts: 2790
From: Italy

@CodeSmith
I do not agree with your overview of Xena. First of all we don't know exactly what model will be hosted on the motherboard, as they said specs are subject to change and there will be different configs, so a model with the XcoreG4 is in order I presume.

Secondly, it is on board because this way every X1000 user will have one and this will prompt usage by programmers. The strenghs of the Xcore (like the T800 way before it)is in its scalability, so a software that uses it will need an extra card (on the Xorro slot) only if the end user needs more performance (but this card won't be mandatory).

Another Amiga-like usage is to replicate what happened in the past with the A2000 where those expansion slots (both Video and CPU) prompted manufaturers in several industries (but mainly the TV Broadcast industry) to create professional expansion cards for those markets.

Due to extreme flexibility of what can be done with XCore I don't think anyone knows what's to come and if you think about it, when the A2000 came out in 1987 did anybody imagined the Video Toaster, RTG the Wildfire and so on?

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TrevorDick 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 11:15:15
#244 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 30-Dec-2004
Posts: 2678
From: Wellington

@Cameraman & @Johan

Be careful what you wish for!

TrevorD

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Johan 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 11:19:07
#245 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 12-Jan-2004
Posts: 161
From: Behind dikes, on seabottom. Netherlands, that is. More exact: Flevoland.

@TrevorDick

Can we go back to a normal "yes" or "no" instead of riddles

edit: added another smiley:


johan

Last edited by Johan on 06-Jan-2010 at 11:21 AM.

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CodeSmith 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 11:27:39
#246 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 8-Mar-2003
Posts: 3045
From: USA

@vidarh

Quote:

vidarh wrote:
@CodeSmith

Quote:
The PA6T-1682M (one of the contenders for the X1000 CPU) running at 2GHz (the rumored speed of the CPU) clocks in at 8,800 MIPS (source). That means that if Xena wasn't present, the main CPU would be able to to pick up the slack using only ~5% of itself.


That math just doesn't add up. Even AmigaOS has sufficient overhead in interrupt handling and thread scheduling that for any remotely IO intensive (and thus interrupt intensive if done on the main CPU) overheads could easily far surpass the actual processing done, while the XCore can retrieve data from IO ports (or write to them) in 1 clock cycle and continue right in the middle of the same control flow as before.

What you say is true, but (assuming you're not using Xena to process data from eg external sensors) the overhead of the PCIe bus will dwarf the 1 clock cycle latency.

Quote:

Quote:
Yes, one can add more XMOS chips via the Xorro slot, but this would lead to "to run this game, you need the Individual Computers Quad Xena and clockport card". Unless this card is bundled with new X1000s, I don't see that program selling too many copies - think back to the days of A500s and FPUs: how many programs required an FPU at the time?


True, but how many programs required the trapdoor memory expansion? Lots, and lots. Eventually I didn't know anyone who had an A500 without 1MB of memory.

If Xena takes off and gets widely used, and that will depend greatly on the community, then I'd expect to see first the quad core version becoming standard on newer models, and possibly even more than one. And then you might start seeing people buying cards to bring their older models up to scratch. These chips are *cheap*, and they drop rapidly in price once you get reasonable volume.

What it boils down to is whether or not Xena gets used in any "killer apps" that can also benefit from increasing the number of cores. The FPU didn't have any killer apps that were of interest for most people at the time. I don't we can predict very well now whether Xena will.

Exactly - games were the "killer app" that drove all those 1MB expansion sales, because 512KB just wasn't enough room to fit a typical late 80s game. A 2GHz CPU has a huge amount of processing power. The x86 world has pretty much stagnated in the 2GHz-3GHz range because it's simply enough to do pretty much anything the average person would want.

Quote:

Quote:
Simple: look at its little brother, the SAM440. It's got an FPGA on board, which as far as I can tell is still pretty much unused by the community


FPGAs, simpler than ASICs as they may be, still requires you to understand hardware design using Verilog or VHDL to get anything useful done. That's a *far* higher hurdle than needing to know C with a handful of simple extensions. That's the other thing that gets me excited about the XCore: It's simple. If you know C, you know 99% of what you need to know to be able to get programs running on one.


Yes, but the question is why bother? the main CPU can also be programmed in C, and you won't have to put up with whatever limitations Xena has (for starters, it only has 64KB of memory so any data larger than that will have to be DMA'd in, processed and DMA'd back out again).

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Dandy 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 11:36:08
#247 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Mar-2003
Posts: 3049
From: Cologne * Germany

@KimmoK

Quote:

KimmoK wrote:
@ONLY_AMIGA

In Finland A1000 cost 2500¤ when it came.
...



You had the Euro in Finnland back in 1985?
I thought it wasn't introduced before Jan 1st, 2002, Europewide?

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CodeSmith 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 11:37:02
#248 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 8-Mar-2003
Posts: 3045
From: USA

@DAX

You'd be 100% correct if the X1000 didn't have a monster of a main CPU. Pretty much anything that you can do with the Xena that doesn't involve processing external data streams you can brute-force with the 2GHz CPU. The only thing that Xena can do that the main CPU can't is process data from external sources without any glitching. For example, there is a video game design in the XMOS site that outputs NTSC video; it's done by directly generating the video signal by software. That requires such a degree of timing stability that there's no way the main CPU would be able to do it. That's what Xena's absolutely great at. But I seriously don't see the average amigan spending more time with a soldering iron and oscilloscope than doing more "normal" stuff with it.

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Dandy 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 11:38:39
#249 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Mar-2003
Posts: 3049
From: Cologne * Germany

@KimmoK

Quote:

KimmoK wrote:
@ONLY_AMIGA

...
I expect X1000 to cost 2495¤ with AOS4.1.1beta.



Hadn't it been said it would be cheaper than the 1295 US$ the original A1k did cost when it hit the market in 1985?

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He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
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Dandy 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 11:43:45
#250 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Mar-2003
Posts: 3049
From: Cologne * Germany

@BigBentheAussie

Quote:

BigBentheAussie wrote:

...
I find it interesting that OSNews has a news item up about the X1000 before AW and A.org.



At least amiga-news.de had the news yesterday...

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Dandy
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He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
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KimmoK 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 11:48:01
#251 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 14-Mar-2003
Posts: 5211
From: Ylikiiminki, Finland

@Dandy

A1000 cost 15000FMK in 1985...1986.
!¤ is 6FMK
-> 2500¤

I see no possibility to get the Nemo below 2000¤
But if it happens, I'm happy to be wrong.

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

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vidarh 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 13:00:25
#252 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 4-Jan-2010
Posts: 580
From: London, UK (ex-pat; originally from Norway)

@CodeSmith

Quote:
The x86 world has pretty much stagnated in the 2GHz-3GHz range because it's simply enough to do pretty much anything the average person would want.


The x86 world has pretty much stagnated there because bringing the architectures much further up increases the cost far too much compared to adding cores, and because the heat generation and power needs are too massive to work for the majority of the market (laptops now outsell desktops by a good margin). (EDIT: fixed "laptops now outsell laptops"...)

On the other hand, quad cores are now becoming more and more common on the desktop, and that will skyrocket as more apps manage to make use of the extra cores efficiently.

I *regularly* max out the CPU on my dual-core 2GHz x86-64 laptop (running Linux). Even with just a web browser sometimes.

With games, practically any reasonably advanced modern game can max out a CPU like that irrespective of other factors (like graphics card). In fact, gaming is one of the main drivers for quad-core and higher on the desktop in the x86 world - any reasonably advanced strategy game for example, can trivially easily saturate more or less as many cores as you want to throw at it just doing better A* searches or AI - both are currently severely limited by lack of CPU (and also not very suitable for acceleration using GP-GPU type approaches).

The x86 world even have people bringing out dedicated cards just to offload physics calculations for games, because CPU capacity isn't increasing fast enough.

Peoples desire for more CPU power will be there for a long time still.

Quote:
Yes, but the question is why bother? the main CPU can also be programmed in C, and you won't have to put up with whatever limitations Xena has (for starters, it only has 64KB of memory so any data larger than that will have to be DMA'd in, processed and DMA'd back out again).


Because Xena has 64 bi-directional IO lines that are easily accessible, and because it provides far lower latency in processing than the main CPU has any hope of matching. Depending on how tightly it is integrated in the rest of the system there might very well be more reasons.

In other words: You "bother" for the things you simply *can't* do on the main CPU (due to latency or lack of IO lines) or where the overheads of doing on the main CPU are massive (i.e. anything that'd cause an uncomfortably high interrupt rate), and that you *don't* do on current systems without buying expansion cards. XMOS are marketing these as "software defined silicon" for a reason - they're not competing with the CPU but with FPGAs, ASICs and other custom logic.

Last edited by vidarh on 06-Jan-2010 at 01:03 PM.

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VidarL 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 13:42:30
#253 ]
Member
Joined: 16-May-2003
Posts: 75
From: Unknown

@CodeSmith

Quote:
The x86 world has pretty much stagnated in the 2GHz-3GHz range because it's simply enough to do pretty much anything the average person would want.


The reason the clockspeed hasn't gone up a lot in the last few years isn't because everyone thinks modern processors are fast enough. It's because AMD and Intel have been busy increasing the IPC(instructions per clock) of their processors as the means to get better performance. Single thread performance has increased dramatically in the last few years. The first big increase came with the launch of Core2.

The single thread performance increases combined with multi core means that x86/x64 is futher ahead of PPC than ever before.

I'm willing to bet a lot of money on the fact that the CPU in the X1000 won't alter that significantly. The best we can hope for is a CPU that is almost competitive in performance with the current dual core Intel Atom/AMD Neo at the same power levels, but at a much higher price, and for only a short time, until Intel/AMD launches their next generations.



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Dandy 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 13:47:32
#254 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Mar-2003
Posts: 3049
From: Cologne * Germany

@DoodooHead

Quote:

DoodooHead wrote:

...
sound in Hifi
...



HiFi norm was crap - it just had a frequency range from 60 to 12500 Hz, IIRC.
EQUA norm had 20 to 20.000 Hz, IIRC...

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Dandy
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If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
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billt 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 13:56:53
#255 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Oct-2003
Posts: 3205
From: Maryland, USA

@Tomas

Quote:
Why the hell did Apple buy PA semi anyways? Just so they could kill it to get rid of competition?


How was PA Semi a competitor to Apple?

The assumption is that Apple wanted the low-power-consumption expertise of the engineers to make low-power thus longer battery life chips for iphone/ipod. Or adding more features without killing battery life. Or both.

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VidarL 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 14:09:01
#256 ]
Member
Joined: 16-May-2003
Posts: 75
From: Unknown

Jeff Atwood (behind codinghorror.com and stackoverflow.com) posted this on Twitter yesterday:

Tweet #1:
I used to own an Amiga (A1000 and A500) but this Zombie Amiga is just .. pointless. http://is.gd/5Nytl

Tweet #2:
news flash: when Apple switched to x86, the race was over. Intel won. x86 Uber Alles.

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TrevorDick 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 14:52:59
#257 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 30-Dec-2004
Posts: 2678
From: Wellington

@Johan

Quote:
Can we go back to a normal "yes" or "no" instead of riddles

err Yes, NO err maybe?

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TheSLASH! 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 15:20:18
#258 ]
Member
Joined: 18-Jun-2003
Posts: 50
From: Sweden

Has there been any secrets revealed on the A-Eon site today?

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KimmoK 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 15:55:11
#259 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 14-Mar-2003
Posts: 5211
From: Ylikiiminki, Finland

about CPU clockrates...

After 3Ghz the CPUs seem to hit barrier. The speed of light, the heat, slow memory.

After P4 intel knew that it was a mistake. Started to increase caches etc... to the P3 design. -> Core2.

Now, to me it seems that Titan has some interesting combination of P4 kind of stuff (L0 cache) and then traditional L1 and L2 caches. Even though it does not beat modern high end desktop CPUs, it would be roughly the fastest embedded chip.

Perhaps competitive with 2Ghz AMD X2 chips with same amount of cache.

but, we'll see if it is Titan cores containing chip or not. I bet it is.

btw.
This is from the 6.html
Today's hidden message
THANK YOU!
No more hints, no more puzzles, we're done... for now. A big thanks to everyone who's been along on the ride with us, and we hope you've had as much fun solving the conundrums as we've had setting them, and watching everyone on the boards crack the code. As you probably know, we like the slogan 'Remember when computing was fun?' and we wanted to bring a little fun in with this announcement too.
You folks are seriously clever, and a part of the challenge for us has been making sure it wasn't all too easy. No shout-outs to specific names, because we'd be bound to forget someone, but we'll say this: we've been impressed by your deductive powers!
We'll have a proper website before too long, when we've got more to tell you. No more yellow and black colour scheme either, if I have anything to do with it, I promise. That was one of the hints -- and believe me, by now I'm royally sick of it. ;^)

Puzzle setter/web designer's 'and finally': producing a static, templateless website page-by-page, day-by-day is not something I recommend. I'm looking forward to a nice relaxing day tomorrow, when I'm finally going to get the chance to go and watch Avatar (yes, my girlfriend is feeling much better now). Bye all!

Last edited by KimmoK on 06-Jan-2010 at 04:00 PM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 06-Jan-2010 at 03:59 PM.

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

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Johan 
Re: MAP == A-Eon.com? Part 3
Posted on 6-Jan-2010 16:10:51
#260 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 12-Jan-2004
Posts: 161
From: Behind dikes, on seabottom. Netherlands, that is. More exact: Flevoland.

@TrevorDick

That is, sir, more or less the answer I expected...

johan

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