Gunnar von Boehn (Apollo Team Member) Posts 6254 07 Mar 2023 18:36
| Jay West wrote:
| The Vampire is a cool device, but I was thinking about open source software ports like Libreoffice. For future vampire cards, if they had ARM chips included onboard as co-processors, like with the 68k and PowerPC was, would this make porting ARM versions of software worthwhile? Could the arm chips be used for other stuff like video playback? Thanks. Jay.
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Hello Jay, Actually we are very happy that we have the 68080 CPU. The Apollo 68080 CPU is much nicer and better to program than both PowerPC and ARM. As you will know the 68080 is CISC CPU this means it has very powerful instruction and excellent addresmodee to use. This makes is very nice and easy to program. Maybe you know that POWERPC and ARM are only RISC CPUs. RISC designs do sacrifice the performance of a CISC CPU for being easier and cheaper to produce than a powerful CISC. Maybe you know that one 68K instruction are very strong and can do a lot work in a single instruction, for doing the same amount of work on a weaker RISC CPU you need in often many instructions. This could be that you need for example 3 or 6 PowerPC or ARM instruction for doing the same work as a SINGLE 68k instruction. If you are aware of this then you will fully understand that the 68080 easily outperforms ARM chips of the same clock.- You are right the idea to have an Amiga with an "cheap" PowerPC CPU added as workslave was tried before. And as you might recall this idea failed badly. First of all Amiga OS does not support more than 1 CPU. It would support more than 1 CPU - then certainly the most cleanest and best solution would be to have 2 68K CPU. As all Amiga software could then run on both. I should clear that having 2 different CPU is software wise a very complex situation = a mess. And if you try to mix CPU of different ENDIAN then you get into even more messy situation. And adding another CPU to your system will not allow you to run more software. To run a WORDPROGRAM on you need to port this software to AMIGA! When you have ported it - then you can compile it for 68K.
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