CPU speeds... and why Amiga will never "come back"

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CPU speeds... and why Amiga will never "come back"

Post by terriblefire »

One of the things i frequently get pinged about in comments etc is about amiga "coming back". Or taking "amiga into the future".

I was reminded of these when i was watching this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCy1IKPev4w


Some numbers mentioned Amiga 4000T with 75Mhz 060 = 100 Mips. Pretty sweet right?

Well a RPi3 from 2014 is 5000 Mips... (not even a high end machine), A mid range (edited) desktop from 2014 (i7 4770K @ 4Gz) does 133,000 Mips and a 2020 3990X Thread ripper does a whopping 2,356,000 Mips. This is just raw mips not Flops etc.

Talking about the Amiga making a comeback or modernising it is like persuading people to cross the Atlantic in a slightly faster biplane. Sure some people will do it for the lolz but nobody will do it seriously or if they are trying to accomplish a goal unrelated to retro computing.

This is also why i think the FPGA route for CPU design is a dead end. 300Mips is probably the theoretical limit unless FPGAs get much much better. Solutions like Buffee and PiStorm are the future once our supply of real chips is exhausted.

This is why i say dont worry about whether your retro computer is useful. Just enjoy it. Fun things dont have to be useful
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Re: CPU speeds... and why Amiga will never "come back"

Post by PaulJ_2.0 »

Yes, I was having this conversation with someone about FPGA being the future.
I was explaining that FPGA would probably top out at around 3-400MHz at current tech, which is nowhere near fast enough to compete with the likes of the PiStorm or Buffee.
He seems to think that FPGA can do much faster speeds, but from what I can gather, I can't see it at all.
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Re: CPU speeds... and why Amiga will never "come back"

Post by sporniket »

About the FPGA, are we talking about entry level ones (like e.g. the one on the DE-10 nano, spartan6, ecp5,... with boards around 50-150$€) or also up to the high-level ones (1500-2000$€ -around the price of a Falcon030 nowadays- and beyond) ? (Honestly curious about that)
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Re: CPU speeds... and why Amiga will never "come back"

Post by terriblefire »

sporniket wrote: Wed Jun 15, 2022 10:28 am About the FPGA, are we talking about entry level ones (like e.g. the one on the DE-10 nano, spartan6, ecp5,... with boards around 50-150$€) or also up to the high-level ones (1500-2000$€ -around the price of a Falcon030 nowadays- and beyond) ? (Honestly curious about that)
The ones i'm most familiar with is the big end Virtex 5/6 chips. They are massively impressive bits of kit but they're designed to make compute *wide*, e.g. single cycle DSP type operations, not flat out clock speed. I'd need to check what the current FPGAs are up to but these guys were expensive and awesome but they cannot clock like an ASIC can.

This was the reason that bitcoin mining on FPGAs only lasted a year or two before it moved over to ASICs.

The spartan 6 FPGA could only do 80Mhz or so with a fully pipelined and wishbone compatible bus ao68000. That design was very clean but the S6 couldnt go faster.

You can simply go look this up because FPGAs have pin to pin and gate to gate specs that basically limit your clock frequency. I've not seen one better than 5ns but they may exist. 5ns is roughly 200Mhz max. Beyond that you end up with specific FPGA fabric designed for the job. E.g. the Spartan 6 "T" edition has parts that can do PCIe.
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Re: CPU speeds... and why Amiga will never "come back"

Post by Dbug »

terriblefire wrote: Wed Jun 15, 2022 10:09 am A bog standard desktop from 2014 (i7 4770K @ 4Gz) does 133,000 Mips
I agree with the entire message.

Just want to point out that a "i7 4770k" is not what you found in a "bog standard desktop", the K models are designed to be overclocked, and that's a i7, so that was on the high end side of things when it was released :)

A medium range desktop would have been like a no-k i5.
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Re: CPU speeds... and why Amiga will never "come back"

Post by terriblefire »

Dbug wrote: Wed Jun 15, 2022 11:26 am
terriblefire wrote: Wed Jun 15, 2022 10:09 am A bog standard desktop from 2014 (i7 4770K @ 4Gz) does 133,000 Mips
I agree with the entire message.

Just want to point out that a "i7 4770k" is not what you found in a "bog standard desktop", the K models are designed to be overclocked, and that's a i7, so that was on the high end side of things when it was released :)

A medium range desktop would have been like a no-k i5.
Fair enough. I got a i7 in the mid range Lenovo laptop i got in 2013. Probably why i thought it was a bog standard.
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Re: CPU speeds... and why Amiga will never "come back"

Post by mgi »

I also do not really understand the idea of pushing those old computers so much. The whole idea of them being retro is to be retro.

I was playing with V4SA but then I tried the Pimiga 2.0 on Pi400 and it that was an eye opening moment. Cost of the FPGA and the speed is not even close to the modern platforms. And let's be honest - FPGA as well as UAE etc is just a different type of emulation of the original hardware.
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Re: CPU speeds... and why Amiga will never "come back"

Post by terriblefire »

mgi wrote: Wed Jun 15, 2022 11:46 am I also do not really understand the idea of pushing those old computers so much. The whole idea of them being retro is to be retro.
My own stuff has been about trying to make the stuff you could get in the 90s but is now prohibitively expensive. But i agree that retro should be retro. My A1000 is unexpanded and I would never consider putting an accelerator in there.
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Re: CPU speeds... and why Amiga will never "come back"

Post by stephen_usher »

Well, what made the Amiga special in the first place was that it was at least a generation ahead when it came to the graphics capability, both hardware and software support in the OS. The CPU was no faster than the other machines on the market at the time.

If you were to "bring it back" you really wouldn't be looking at an m68k machine (the later AmigaDOS machines weren't based upon this either) and really you would have to look at basing it upon commodity hardware, either PC based or, probably better for future-proofing, 64 bit ARM and then building the OS and graphics manipulation support on top. If you wanted it to be an "Amiga", as in running the old software then you would need to have an integrated m68k VM which would seamlessly run the old code and simulate the old hardware.

All this work though would be for a tiny niche market where it would never be profitable.
Intro retro computers since before they were retro...
ZX81->Spectrum->Memotech MTX->Sinclair QL->520STM->BBC Micro->TT030->PCs & Sun Workstations.
Added code to the MiNT kernel (still there the last time I checked) + put together MiNTOS.
Collection now with added Macs, Amigas, Suns and Acorns.
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Re: CPU speeds... and why Amiga will never "come back"

Post by mgi »

stephen_usher wrote: Wed Jun 15, 2022 12:05 pm If you were to "bring it back" you really wouldn't be looking at an m68k machine (the later AmigaDOS machines weren't based upon this either) and really you would have to look at basing it upon commodity hardware, either PC based or, probably better for future-proofing, 64 bit ARM and then building the OS and graphics manipulation support on top. If you wanted it to be an "Amiga", as in running the old software then you would need to have an integrated m68k VM which would seamlessly run the old code and simulate the old hardware.
I think this is exactly what the Pimiga is - running on ARM64 within the Pi4 and executing the original code.
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