@QuikSanz

Huh ??

Did you even bother to read that PR-babble from AEon ? You know the part where they write about routing the XMOS-IO-pins to that XORRO-slot ?

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@Kronos,

Yes, I did. So whats wrong with having the I/O pins on the Xorro slot. There are pins left over that connect to the X1000 and Xena is also connected to the machine. You seem to know how it's connected to the X1000. Please enlighten us.

Chris

@QuikSanz

And where did >I< write anything about that ? Offcourse it's connected to the rest of the mobo, even if it's just for programming it. It might have ways to create interupts maybe even access to a limited piece of the CPU-address-space.

But all the ideas that involve purely internal uses for the XMOS are even more nonsense than the ones requiring external wiring (through XORRO).

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@Kronos,

So let me get this straight. You have no idea how this is connected to machine but you know that there are no applications that will utilize it better in this fashion. Again, you must be psychic.

I can think of some applications that would benefit from it being embedded, It would be a two part system, the other part would be out in the world doing some work.

Obviously uninspired non creative people are all over the place.

Chris

I wonder what OS the xena is running by default?
( http://www.xcore.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=98 )

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@QuikSanz

>So let me get this straight. You have no idea how this is connected to machine but you know
>that there are no applications that will utilize it better in this fashion. Again, you must be psychic.

How about some reading&understanding before replying ?

- I never claimed to know how it's connected
- all ideas mentioned sofar not involving external wiring could be done quite easily useing CPU/GPU
- you've yet to come up with ONE example suggesting otherwise

>I can think of some applications that would benefit from it being embedded,
- good for you, but aslong as you don't spill the beans the orginal question of this thread remains unsanswered

>It would be a two part system, the other part would be out in the world doing some work.
- sounds like you are planning on external wiring afterall, now if you tell us why it couldn't be done with standard parts&ports or the XMOS dangling on USB ...

>Obviously uninspired non creative people are all over the place.
Obviously apologetic and single-minded people all over the place

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While I think it's rather stupid to speculate on pros/cons of something which we don't even know much about yet, I'll briefly join in the stupidity by posting a few of my thoughts... I think the reasons for having the XMOS on the mobo (rather than a card) include:

1. Faster connection to the CPU (speculation, but not unreasonable given all the *other* speculation being posted). Might "only" be used to program the XMOS chip, or it might allow more general communication (which would allow the sort of thing that Kronos is apparently after).

2. Standardise on a particular chip (didn't need to be XMOS) so that:
(a) the hardware & development tools can come with the OS, meaning "everyone" can play with it. Imagine if part or all of the Amiga's chipset had been an "optional" plugin card for the A1000 & A500 - hardly anybody would have experimented with it or used it!
(b) everyone can focus their development efforts (hardware & software) on one particular chip. That is less likely if it was a plug-in card.

3. As for the choice of XMOS over some other chip, well, XMOS *is* a really good chip for handling I/O + timing very fast & reliably. It isn't better at crunching numbers than the main CPU, but that wouldn't make much sense anyway (X1000 already has a multi-core PPC cpu).


Just a reminder: I think all this speculation about pros/cons is foolish, when we don't know much about it yet. You guys really need some patience.

Last edited by ChrisH on 03-Mar-2010 at 10:16 AM.

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another old idea...
but it just refreshed to my mind of how nice it would be if a computer had built in watchdog system to make them more stable in multimedia kiosk systems (etc.)

Almost daily I see information sharing systems or adverticing screens that have some error prompt / lockup / bluescreen /whatever waiting for some user to come and give a kick.

Perhaps xena is wired so that watchdog feature would be possible to do without any extra HW.

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// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
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@Kronos
Given that AEon say that Xena can be connected to the rest of the system (mobo), and thus presumably communicate using the system's bus, that would open all sorts of interesting possibilities, including DMAing data into or out of RAM. At that point Xena would become a useful co-processor.

And if we learnt anything from the Classic Amiga chipset, it is that having (semi) programmable co-processors to take the load of the main CPU can be a very good thing. Just because the CPU *can* do anything with brute force, doesn't mean it's always the best way. Especially if the co-processor is specialise on particular tasks (in Xena's case this would be extremely low-latency response & extremely high-precision timing).

Last edited by ChrisH on 03-Mar-2010 at 10:13 AM.

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@KimmoK

yeah that reminds me of some device I was working on a long time ago when the idea of sharing A1's over the net came up, to allow devs to remotely access PPC amigas to test their OS4 apps.

The objective was to have a simple HW watchdog with a countdown timer which would short the reset pins of the A1 motherboard if the OS crashed and thus some commodity stopped sending a "life beat" to reset the HW device's timer.

Most likely that could be done with the xcore chip if as I understand it its software runs independently from the host machine.

Another use for that chip I'd be interested in is to emulate a pair of PS/2 ports as I've never liked using USB for input devices.

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@ChrisH

The Amiga-Chipset was a great help when it was connected to an 68000. Put a 68020 or better into the system and it will drag the CPU more down then it's helping it ....

Assuming "Xena" could do DMA directly into systems RAM (and may I add, that takes alot of assuming to start with), what source would this data have ?
Take for example the way GPUs are used to today.

You shove some data into the GFX-Cards mem (up to 1GB these days) and then let the GPU do some heavy proccesing. At the end of it you either let the GPU display it or you transfer it back to main memory.

Transferring the data back&forth only makes sense if the GPU can do things much faster then the CPU.

Xena is weak compared to the CPU, Xena only has 64k of RAM, hardly ideal for such concepts.

Working Xena onto the systems bus in a similar way than Agnus&Co were attached to the 68k would bring a reduction of bandwitdh available to the CPU and a whole lot potential problems with cache-coherence.

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@AlexC

Quote:

AlexC wrote: yeah that reminds me of some device I was working on a long time ago when the idea of sharing A1's over the net came up, to allow devs to remotely access PPC amigas to test their OS4 apps. The objective was to have a simple HW watchdog with a countdown timer which would short the reset pins of the A1 motherboard if the OS crashed and thus some commodity stopped sending a "life beat" to reset the HW device's timer. Most likely that could be done with the xcore chip if as I understand it its software runs independently from the host machine. Another use for that chip I'd be interested in is to emulate a pair of PS/2 ports as I've never liked using USB for input devices.

Hm, telescope control, watchdogs, ports. Maybe something similar to this to tie things into
the x1 slot. (?)

http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/ts2pcie2212.html