Author Topic: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz? (Read 5146 times)

AmigaClassicRule · « **on:** April 15, 2014, 03:45:53 AM »

Hey,

I am just curious...can someone make an Amiga FPGA 060 that can run at 233 Mhz? Is it possible? How expensive would it be to make it?

ElPolloDiabl · « **Reply #1 on:** April 15, 2014, 05:24:42 AM »

I don't think it is about expense. The FPGA is a little bit different, so you can't just input the 060 into it. There is some designing involved.
It will get there though. 2 years maybe?

matthey · « **Reply #2 on:** April 15, 2014, 07:33:21 AM »

Quote from: AmigaClassicRule;762558

I am just curious...can someone make an Amiga FPGA 060 that can run at 233 Mhz? Is it possible? How expensive would it be to make it?

I think it's possible. There are some very expensive fpgas costing thousands of dollars that should be able to do it. An Altera Stratix (high end) probably could and maybe an Arria (mid range) which is approaching affordable (hundreds to thousands of dollars). A CPU in a (low end) Cyclone III-V costing ~$50-$500 would probably not exceed 150-200MHz but I think it may be able to come close to the performance of a 233MHz 68060. Most fpgas have plenty of memory bandwidth but are limited in clock speeds. The trick is using parallel operations to take advantage of the memory bandwidth. I believe it's possible for an fpga CPU to substantially exceed the performance per MHz of a 68060. The memory bandwidth can be better, more parallel pipes/operations may be possible, bigger caches are possible, a link stack helps and ISA improvements should be good. Some things are slower in an fpga so they would need to change from the way the 68060 does them in order to have good speed. All of this would require a CPU more advanced than the TG68 and would take some time and know how to complete.

NovaCoder · « **Reply #3 on:** April 15, 2014, 07:59:28 AM »

Quote from: matthey;762561

I think it's possible. There are some very expensive fpgas costing thousands of dollars that should be able to do it....

Or to put it another way, has electronic design moved forward in the past 20 years

Personally I'd be very happy too see an FPGA card that offered similar CPU performance as my 80Mhz Blizzard (100 MIPS) while remaining 110% compatible (add back the dropped instructions). It would of course be nice to see a card with even more performance but those extra MIPS wouldn't really get much use.

I think price is more important than performance anyway, it would be awesome to see a new 060 'like' FPGA card offered for less than $200.

The other thing to keep in mind is that because the rest of the Classic hardware is so slow (include the bus), there really isn't much point going above 130 MIPS (100Mhz Apollo).

Come to think of it, only DosBox AGA and NetSurf AGA need more than 130 MIPS!

ElPolloDiabl · « **Reply #4 on:** April 15, 2014, 08:21:36 AM »

What about the new additions like USB? Or that would be done by the ARM processor?

vince_6 · « **Reply #5 on:** April 15, 2014, 10:04:13 AM »

I would be fine with a 68020 at 200-300 mips with fpu emulation too :-D

Hattig · « **Reply #6 on:** April 15, 2014, 10:21:25 AM »

Quote from: AmigaClassicRule;762558

Hey,

I am just curious...can someone make an Amiga FPGA 060 that can run at 233 Mhz? Is it possible? How expensive would it be to make it?

Firstly, it's not about creating an FPGA 68060, it's about creating a compatible implementation of the 68060 ISA (IIRC the 68020 ISA is a better target in terms of instructions to implement) that can achieve an overall higher performance, be that via higher IPC (instructions per clock) or higher clocks, or both.

For example, the FPGA core in the Vampire 600 board has a lower IPC than a vanilla 68000, but it runs a lot faster, so the overall speed is improved.

Anyway, with today's FPGA technology, it should be getting to a point where once someone designs a 68020 compatible core that clocks high enough and has decent IPC, we could be looking at higher overall performance than a classic 68060. But it won't be cheap, but OTOH you won't need to worry about specific uncommon revisions of the 68060.

psxphill · « **Reply #7 on:** April 15, 2014, 11:00:58 AM »

Quote from: Hattig;762570

Firstly, it's not about creating an FPGA 68060, it's about creating a compatible implementation of the 68060 ISA (IIRC the 68020 ISA is a better target in terms of instructions to implement)

The advantage of going for the 68060 ISA is that Motorola removed some instructions that aren't used much, so you have work to do. You can make use of the effort people have made to make most/all software run on an 060

The 68060 MMU is simpler than the MMU used with the 68020 too.

wawrzon · « **Reply #8 on:** April 15, 2014, 12:34:37 PM »

i rather doubt the future of amiga is fpga. fpga is too slow (not even as fast as 040 on affordable chips), too hard to program (none of the few 68k softcores is even fully 020 compliant, not to speak of fpu and mmu) and to expensive overall.

if there is any future its with amithlon like systems imho. either x86 based optional with some fpga expansion for backwards compatibility or genuine amiga based with x86 accelerator running 68k emu. thats the only options i see, otherwise we need to stick to what we already have.

not telling fpga projects should be given up, but i wouldnt expect too much.

matthey · « **Reply #9 on:** April 15, 2014, 03:44:40 PM »

Quote from: NovaCoder;762564

Personally I'd be very happy too see an FPGA card that offered similar CPU performance as my 80Mhz Blizzard (100 MIPS) while remaining 110% compatible (add back the dropped instructions). It would of course be nice to see a card with even more performance but those extra MIPS wouldn't really get much use.

Adding the extra instructions back isn't important if the emulation library is loaded before booting and it's upgradeable. The missing 64 bit MUL and DIV instructions should be added back as they are in modern hardware. It was a mistake to take them out as compilers like GCC were already making good use of 64 bit MUL to change immediate divisions into multiplies using invert and multiply with large savings. MOVEP was used by some old games (Sierra for example) but the encoding is bad (it was a kludge implemented for 8 bit support). Trapping it like the 68060 makes sense. Most of the other instructions the 68060 took out of hardware were rarely ever used on the Amiga and don't make sense to add them back.

Larger caches would normally be a problem but a modern fpga CPU would probably use writethrough caching for simplicity instead of copyback caching. It can do bus snooping for old programs that didn't properly flush the caches or used self modifying caches. This is potentially more compatible for caching than a 68040 or 68060.

Quote from: NovaCoder;762564

I think price is more important than performance anyway, it would be awesome to see a new 060 'like' FPGA card offered for less than $200.

That price may be possible (in U.S. or Aussie dollars) but most people would want more than a bare bones fpga with faster CPU. At least 64MB of memory is appropriate. Some kind of I/O HD equivalent avoids a bottleneck and SD or CF is pretty cheap. USB and/or ethernet is nice also but it all adds to the price.

Quote from: NovaCoder;762564

The other thing to keep in mind is that because the rest of the Classic hardware is so slow (include the bus), there really isn't much point going above 130 MIPS (100Mhz Apollo).

Come to think of it, only DosBox AGA and NetSurf AGA need more than 130 MIPS!

The ECS/AGA gfx become a bottleneck and then it makes sense to add gfx on the accelerator and/or move to a new stand alone board or motherboard replacement. A faster CPU and gfx will allow you to port more modern games and use DOSBox for older games instead of porting them

.

psxphill · « **Reply #10 on:** April 15, 2014, 06:23:51 PM »

Quote from: matthey;762580

It can do bus snooping for old programs that didn't properly flush the caches or used self modifying caches. This is potentially more compatible for caching than a 68040 or 68060.

It's likely that disabling the cache will be fine for those, the problem of old games has been solved already for the real 68060.

Any software that people write now needs to run on a 68060 as well, so really there is no benefit in deviating from the published specification. If people want to wave their dicks at Motorola at how great a cpu they have designed, then it would be really great if they could do that after creating a 100% compatible 68060.

SpeedGeek · « **Reply #11 on:** April 15, 2014, 06:37:32 PM »

250MHz FPGA chips have been available for quite a while now. That's the easy part... the hard part is reverse engineering the 060 and programming the FPGA to correctly emulate an 060 under a fairly large number of different operating conditions.

Honkybear · « **Reply #12 on:** April 15, 2014, 07:04:16 PM »

Personally I'd be very happy too see an FPGA card that offered similar CPU performance as my 80Mhz Blizzard (100 MIPS) while remaining 110% compatible (add back the dropped instructions). It would of course be nice to see a card with even more performance but those extra MIPS wouldn't really get much use.

I think price is more important than performance anyway, it would be awesome to see a new 060 'like' FPGA card offered for less than $200.

The other thing to keep in mind is that because the rest of the Classic hardware is so slow (include the bus), there really isn't much point going above 130 MIPS (100Mhz Apollo).

Come to think of it, only DosBox AGA and NetSurf AGA need more than 130 MIPS!

Whole heartedly agree Compatibility and Price are definitely weight in factors when it comes down too it

psxphill · « **Reply #13 on:** April 15, 2014, 09:17:20 PM »

Quote from: Honkybear;762591

while remaining 110% compatible (add back the dropped instructions).

You can't be 110% compatible, if you deviate then you're less than 100% compatible.

Unless all exceptions are generated the same as the 68060 (unimplemented instruction etc) then it's not compatible.

NovaCoder · « **Reply #14 on:** April 16, 2014, 01:52:37 AM »

Quote from: matthey;762580

The ECS/AGA gfx become a bottleneck and then it makes sense to add gfx on the accelerator and/or move to a new stand alone board or motherboard replacement. A faster CPU and gfx will allow you to port more modern games and use DOSBox for older games instead of porting them .

When you go down that road (GFX card attached to the accelerator) you might as well replace the entire motherboard (FPGA Arcade style). If you want to keep it authentic (e.g. use AGA) then you can do some very impressive things if you have enough MIPS, even the HD transfer rate will benefit if the card had the same kind of memory timing improvements used by the ACA cards.

Hopefully someone will do it one day, maybe the Vampire600 will come back to life and inspire someone to try the same thing for the A1200 and big box Amiga's

Author Topic: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz? (Read 5146 times)

AmigaClassicRule

Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?

ElPolloDiabl

Re: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?

matthey

Re: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?

NovaCoder

Re: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?

ElPolloDiabl

Re: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?

vince_6

Re: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?

Hattig

Re: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?

psxphill

Re: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?

wawrzon

Re: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?

matthey

Re: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?

psxphill

Re: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?

SpeedGeek

Re: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?

Honkybear

Re: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?

psxphill

Re: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?

NovaCoder

Re: Can FPGA 060 run more than 100 Mhz?