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General ASIC Question

Donald Ferguson

Posts 2
21 Aug 2020 16:35


I have been a lurker here for a looonnnggg time.  I have come out of lurker mode for a question I can't seem to find the answer to on my own.
 
  Me: GPN (General Purpose Nerd).  Got my first computer, Commodore 64, the year they came out.  I was 14 and in heaven.  I eventually got an Amiga 500 and my love of the Amiga is still strong.  I do not currently own any Amiga type of hardware and have not for a long time.  I am not a programmer, unless you count Turbo Pascal from about 30 years ago or an engineer of any kind, thus (GPN)  I first heard of FPGA years ago on an old board that preceded this and used google/wiki to satisfy my curiosity about them in general.
 
  I understand that FPGA is programmable hardware.  For Vampire users this means that they can continue to get updates and new features as they are developed and released by "Flashing" the FPGA with new code.  The trade off of FPGA, as I understand, is speed, they just are not super fast in general. 
 
  ASIC as I understand is mainly what I would consider a cpu today.  It's instructions are baked into the chip and no new features or bug fixes can be added to it.  But it does consume less power and provides better performance, in general, than FPGA.
 
  My Question:  Just what kind of performance boost can Vampire users see when, someday, Vampire goes ASIC?  I am not looking for promises on performance or anything.  I am just trying to get some kind of understanding of what it means for Vampire to go onto ASIC as far a possible performance.  Someday, in the future..
 
  Thanks
 
  Donald
 
 


Vojin Vidanovic
(Needs Verification)
Posts 1916/ 1
21 Aug 2020 17:27


There is no-one that can answer your question now.
  My educated guess would be.
 
  But lets say that with current FPGAs Vamps reach ~100Mhz 68080-MMX.
 
  As such, and as tested with Amiga Lightwave, V2 Vamps are fastests Amigas, but slower then lowest Atom CPU emulating Amiga.
  CLICK HERE 
  These tests are already old, as there are newer FPGA cores and V4 Vamps, that could boost Vamp results plus 10-20 percent, more if software was optimized for Vampire. That could make Vamps even now nearer to slowest presented emulation results (Intel Atom and UAE).
 
  Now, even today there are bigger FPGAs then Cyclone V. With dedicated time and tuning, in an expensive FPGA, Vamps could reach 200-300 Mhz range.
 
  In ASIC potentially this could go to 500-1000 Mhz range for sure, depending on manufacturing process. I believe more then 1Ghz is possible, but lets take 1Ghz as Amigan pipedream, just like it used to be for Pentium II and III CPUs once in past :)
 
  Even then, they would not beat Intel in general purpose, but lets say x10-15 to core 2.9 90Mhz Vamp result - could reach PPC Macs and slower Intel CPUs like AMD A8 emulating Amiga.
 
  And that is all in theory. So goal is clear - make Amiga fast again with no emulation :)
 
  Mind that I expect that real board could enable SATA interface, maybe USB 3.0 etc. faster peripherals. Not that current DDR-DDR3 and fast IDE is bad for Amiga days, but it would be even snappier.


Donald Ferguson

Posts 2
21 Aug 2020 18:06


Thank You.  That is more than I knew before.  :)


David Wright

Posts 373
21 Aug 2020 18:50


at some point chasing the highest mips, mflops, mhz in the Amiga world is just silly. I get we men like to do some things just for the sake of the exercise.

You have the craziness of the super expensive and rare 060 chip search now. Ridiculous prices that really are not much of an improvement on, say, 040 and such. It is getting to the point of tulip bulb mania for our retro hobby.

All that said, fpga is still the best solution especially the way Vampire handles it with other features.


M Rickan

Posts 177
22 Aug 2020 18:54


David Wright wrote:

at some point chasing the highest mips, mflops, mhz in the Amiga world is just silly. I get we men like to do some things just for the sake of the exercise.

I'm sure quite a few people maintained that Pong and 640k were more than enough as well.

A lot of long forgotten hobbyist interests have resurfaced as viable businesses. Wanting more from the Amiga is only natural.


Vladimir Repcak

Posts 359
22 Aug 2020 20:54


I forgot the name of the other accelerator (with the 300 MHz RISC (or was it PowerPC?) as a second chip in the system that you couldn't directly use for your code).
 
  But they require you to obtain 68060, which had reached stratosphere levels.
 
  I understand that there are people who value only original HW, and don't care to pay obscene amounts of money for it, but how on earth are these chips supposed to work over half a century ?
 
  With FPGA, if it dies, you just buy a new FPGA board and flash it. Boom, done !
 
  To me, personally, the peace of mind, that I don't have to keep chasing eBay, deposit ridiculous amount of money (per MHz) into credit card, and then hope this thing gets delivered (does not happen every time) vastly overweighs the benefits of having the "real thing"...

And I understand the "real thing" feeling. I have been chasing for Atari Falcon for years, till I got finally fed up, and decided to simply buy the next one, no matter what.

It had a broken keyboard, very little RAM, many other issues, and my final bid was $300 over the last one, to make sure the other guy understands I'm in it for real. That was $1,800 about half a decade ago...


David Wright

Posts 373
22 Aug 2020 23:24


m rickan wrote:

David Wright wrote:

  at some point chasing the highest mips, mflops, mhz in the Amiga world is just silly. I get we men like to do some things just for the sake of the exercise.
 

 
  I'm sure quite a few people maintained that Pong and 640k were more than enough as well.
 
  A lot of long forgotten hobbyist interests have resurfaced as viable businesses. Wanting more from the Amiga is only natural.

You missed the “at some point” part. Your pong reference is silly and a non sequitur.



Antony Coello

Posts 153
24 Aug 2020 14:27


David Wright wrote:

m rickan wrote:

 
David Wright wrote:

  at some point chasing the highest mips, mflops, mhz in the Amiga world is just silly. I get we men like to do some things just for the sake of the exercise.
 

 
  I'm sure quite a few people maintained that Pong and 640k were more than enough as well.
 
  A lot of long forgotten hobbyist interests have resurfaced as viable businesses. Wanting more from the Amiga is only natural.
 

 
  You missed the “at some point” part. Your pong reference is silly and a non sequitur.
 

I think you have a valid point here though. I believe the Amiga community is a fair amount more fractured than it could be because of this.

Does the fracture matter?

Well depends on what you want to do. If you want an Amiga completely upgraded to be nearly as powerful as a PC, then this is probaby not a big issue.

However, with the 'pong and 640k is enough' attitude, people can work wonders with the unchanged machine. Why do we need constant upgrading?

Look at the C64...more or less everyone is programming for exactly the same hardware. Quite a high userbase, so constant code freshness ensures people are constantly breaking the limits of what the machine could do.

Ive seen several C64 demos which blur the line between C64 and A500. This was only achieved by keeping the goalposts still and building on solid unmoving foundations.And dont forget how good some of the RAM starved demos in the compos (4k, 256byte,etc) are.

So really '640k and pong' would not have been a stagnant level. Its a snapshot of where it was at that time (and people did love pong at that time). If the PC had of stayed there, who knows what sort of innovation would have been realised with 'only' 640kb.


posts 8