@thread

The LWN article is out from behind the paywall:

OpenPOWER opens further

There's some mention of running a softcore implementation on FPGAs.

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@bison

Quote:

bison wrote: @thread The LWN article is out from behind the paywall: OpenPOWER opens further There's some mention of running a softcore implementation on FPGAs.

Yup, running simple version on +$4k fpga.

@thread

Can you imagine if one built on the Minimig project to use the 1.5 GHZ FPGA

mouser - Altera Arria 10 FPGA 10AX016C4U19E3SG

I know its expensive at ~ £300 + board, but in means a fast 68k or PPC of our own for around £500.

It means a new level of productivity, technically it can be done, for our aging machines.

Maybe a Patreon could be set up.

Last edited by asymetrix on 30-Aug-2019 at 11:21 PM.

_________________
Download 499.26 Mbps, 659.94 Mbps Upload :)

@bison

Quote:

There's some mention of running a softcore implementation on FPGAs.

I recall some FPGA based router equipment we had in for testing, like 10-12 years ago, was using part of the FPGA for a softcore PPC which was used to run the management operating system. So the concept is not new.

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@asymetrix

Quote:

asymetrix wrote: @thread Can you imagine if one built on the Minimig project to use the 1.5 GHZ FPGA mouser - Altera Arria 10 FPGA 10AX016C4U19E3SG I know its expensive at ~ £300 + board, but in means a fast 68k or PPC of our own for around £500. It means a new level of productivity, technically it can be done, for our aging machines. Maybe a Patreon could be set up.

Don't know if you are joking or misinformed? Arria 10 have a clock network rated at 800MHz and normal designs will have far lower frequency in practice, compare to the Cyclone III as used in Vampire accelerators with maximum clock frequency of 500MHz. Last I looked Apollo cores run at around 110MHz?

There are faster FPGAs ( https://www.achronix.com/ ) but those are extremely expensive and require deeply pipelined designs to reach higher performance.

@kolla

Quote:

kolla wrote: @bison Quote: There's some mention of running a softcore implementation on FPGAs. I recall some FPGA based router equipment we had in for testing, like 10-12 years ago, was using part of the FPGA for a softcore PPC which was used to run the management operating system. So the concept is not new.

More likely had one of Xilinx's that had real 440 integrated with fpga. I remember seeing one where routers OS was running on 440 and fpga was used for fancy acceleration.

@Rose

That sounds quite plausible, yes. One can fantasise about running OS4 Classic on such a system with a Minimig core on the FPGA, hehe :)

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@thread

Semi-OT question: Is anyone currently manufacturing a Power ISA SoC with an on-board GPU?

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@bison


"Power ISA SoC with an on-board GPU?"

P10xx and T10xx has 2D graphics interface.
I'm not aware that any other in-production PPC has a "useful GPU".


****btw*****

Open Power "knows" about Amiga.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwXX4fqsPrQ&feature=youtu.be&t=177
even more so:
https://youtu.be/bwXX4fqsPrQ?t=1465

"AmigaOS runs on big-endian POWER"
(Damn I spilled my coffee. Need to watch those videos with more care.)

It would be insane (insanely cool) to get some support from IBM side.

Last edited by KimmoK on 23-Jan-2020 at 01:47 PM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 23-Jan-2020 at 12:08 PM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 23-Jan-2020 at 12:07 PM.

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

@bison

Quote:

bison wrote: @thread Semi-OT question: Is anyone currently manufacturing a Power ISA SoC with an on-board GPU?

I suppose the Wii U wouldn't qualify? But then again that is no longer manufactured...
It's onboard GPU is roughly a Radeon HD4800 ... Cpu ran at 1.24Ghz with 3 cores.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_U

Short of an over-priced PPC Mac, this is the best and cheapest mass-produced commercial hardware out there and easy to customize to boot into whatever you want.

For instance - if someone ported MorphOS or OS4 to the Wii U - it could boot directly using this method:
https://wiiu.hacks.guide/coldboot-haxchi.html
as long as someone made a fw.img file that contained the "boot loader" for the OS of choice.

A guide to installing the Homebrew channel which is a pre-cursor to all this is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozDS-H9-CL8

@KimmoK

Quote:

Open Power "knows" about Amiga.

Yes, there are other company that are well aware of the Amiga.

I even obtained a meeting with one of those company...

_________________
retired

@KimmoK

Quote:

P10xx and T10xx has 2D graphics interface.

So did the MPC8610.

But I think these "DIU" Display Interface Unit things are pretty simple framebuffers, not so much a Graphical Processing Unit.

NXP's i.MX8 ARM based SOCs have actual GPUs, from the Vivante GC7000 series, which would be really nice ot have in PPC. Kindof wishful thinking, but would be great to see that in a T104x, T2080, or T4240...

Last edited by billt on 24-Jan-2020 at 03:26 AM.

_________________
All glory to the Hypnotoad!

@KimmoK

Quote:

P10xx and T10xx has 2D graphics interface.

I think those are probably simple frame buffer graphics, but I can't find the specs. I could get by with that for some uses, but it wouldn't be a gaming system, which is important for Amiga.

@Lou

Quote:

I suppose the Wii U wouldn't qualify? But then again that is no longer manufactured...

That would make a nice Amiga system, but the "Espresso" CPU was probably discontinued when the Wii U was discontinued.

@billt

Quote:

NXP's i.MX8 ARM based SOCs have actual CPUs, from the Vivante GC7000 series, which would be really nice ot have in PPC. Kindof wishful thinking, but would be great to see that in a T104x, T2080, or T4240...

I'd like to see a Power-based SoC with the Broadcom VideoCore IV. It's not the best GPU in the world, but the open source driver is in really good shape.

More wishful thinking: The Pi5 uses such a Power-based SoC.

Last edited by bison on 23-Jan-2020 at 10:45 PM.
Last edited by bison on 23-Jan-2020 at 10:43 PM.
Last edited by bison on 23-Jan-2020 at 10:40 PM.

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@bison

>simple frame buffer graphics

Yes.

>I could get by with that for some uses, but it wouldn't be a gaming system,

It would do retro games ok.

If someone did "GPU" (like PaRisc/Hombre) via SW and the second core, it might be able to do more.
(but in practice it would be waste of resources when we have drivers for Radeon GPUs)

It would be superb to get 4Ghz CPU core from OpenPower, integrated with Radeon GPU, but that's just a fantasy that does not happen.

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

@KimmoK Quote:

KimmoK wrote: Open Power "knows" about Amiga. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwXX4fqsPrQ&feature=youtu.be&t=177 even more so: https://youtu.be/bwXX4fqsPrQ?t=1465 "AmigaOS runs on big-endian POWER" (Damn I spilled my coffee. Need to watch those videos with more care.) It would be insane (insanely cool) to get some support from IBM side.

@AmigaBlitter Quote:

AmigaBlitter wrote: @KimmoK Quote: Open Power "knows" about Amiga. Yes, there are other company that are well aware of the Amiga. I even obtained a meeting with one of those company...

I think that will be really insane, for such companies (IBM included), to think about investing in some post-Amiga project.

The post-Amiga community is really small, and only counting a few thousands fans. There's nothing that such a micro-niche market can attract. And I'm talking to the overall market: 68K & PowerPC Amigas/post-Amigas.

Around 10 years ago I've already stated that, looking at the roadmaps and the products available and coming, the PowerPC architecture was at a deadline. And it wasn't rocket science: just a simple taking the facts and draw the conclusions.

It doesn't change the picture even now that IBM decided to open the OpenPOWER consortium, and opening/freeing the architecture: it's a too late move (which also MIPS followed, BTW), and clearly a desperate tentative to get some attraction to investors and other company.

PowerPC, as well as MIPS and other architectures which are still making business, are at a dead-end. ARM already replaced them in the embedded market, and in the last period RISC-V is taking the scene eating such market(s) to ARM as well.

Other architectures other than ARM and RISC-V in those markets have no chance to improve their situation: on the contrary, they will succumb. Especially PowerPC, that has nothing really attractive (code density, which is an important feature there, is really poor. Just to give an example).

BTW, IBM is only officially supporting little-endian with POWER/PowerPCs. And it makes sense: it's the de facto standard. All mainstream architectures are little-endian. All software is supporting little-endian.

There's so future for big-endian architectures neither for big-endian software: everything which is already existing is legacy, and active projects will not receive any support because it's just a waste of time and resources.

The same happens to the 68K, which is already a legacy architecture (no matter if some new project tries to revamp it), and the software which was written for it.

After 10 years people should understand that the game ended, and that the our beloved platforms are just legacy, to be used as retrocomputing/gaming. Have fun with that, but believing on a rebirth is just childish.

@cdimauro

Quote:

It doesn't change the picture even now that IBM decided to open the OpenPOWER consortium, and opening/freeing the architecture: it's a too late move (which also MIPS followed, BTW), and clearly a desperate tentative to get some attraction to investors and other company.

People seem to have forgotten that also Sun tried same thing back in 00's with Sparc and it went nowhere.

Quote:

PowerPC, as well as MIPS and other architectures which are still making business, are at a dead-end.

MIPS ain't as dead as people seem to think. Guess which arch vast majority of consumer grade routers run. Both Broadcom and Qualcom have pretty nice cheap MIPS SoC's with integrated wifi and switch.

@Rose

Last I checked, Fujitsu still develop and sell Sparc systems.

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@kolla

Yes they do, mostly for legacy reasons. But it doesn't mean that they are roaring success like people here seem to think that PowerPC will become now since it's open.

@Rose Quote:

Rose wrote: @cdimauro Quote: It doesn't change the picture even now that IBM decided to open the OpenPOWER consortium, and opening/freeing the architecture: it's a too late move (which also MIPS followed, BTW), and clearly a desperate tentative to get some attraction to investors and other company. People seem to have forgotten that also Sun tried same thing back in 00's with Sparc and it went nowhere.

Exactly. SPARC is open from long time, providing also a compressed extension, but it's only a legacy architecture.
Quote:

Quote: PowerPC, as well as MIPS and other architectures which are still making business, are at a dead-end. MIPS ain't as dead as people seem to think. Guess which arch vast majority of consumer grade routers run. Both Broadcom and Qualcom have pretty nice cheap MIPS SoC's with integrated wifi and switch.

And PowerPC is also still used in automotive. But those architectures will be replaced by ARM and/or RISC-V.

Qualcomm is already a very strong partner of the latter: https://riscv.org/members-at-a-glance/

Strangely Broadcom is not part of the long list, but I think that it's only question of time. In fact, there's also NXP (was Freescale!) and... even IBM!
Quote:

Rose wrote: @kolla Yes they do, mostly for legacy reasons. But it doesn't mean that they are roaring success like people here seem to think that PowerPC will become now since it's open.

Indeed.

@cdimauro

Quote:

Strangely Broadcom is not part of the long list, but I think that it's only question of time.

Not strange at all considering that Broadcom owns MIPS IP and for their use cases it's "Good enoug".