> 060 was too slow in commodore times.

The 68060 was introduced the same month Commodore went bankrupt.

> We programmers we will continue to use PPC

You mean m68k programmers are no real programmers? ;-)

> Amiga OS for x86 should be an open source implementation of BOOPSI, mui

AROS?

> datatypes for linux, Os X and Windows.

What's that?

> Rest of the OS should be dropped.

No ARexx?

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Good point, Andreas.
Did Commodore do anything above an 030 itself?
The Amiga bus seems, at best, suited for an 030.

My own company's best board was 020 based, and this was vastly superior to the regular 68K.
The entire 68K range, at least in my opinion, falls into three groups. First the basic 68000 and similar processors like the 68010. Then the 020 and 030, and finally the 040 and 060.
There very very big jumps in performance per cycle at each of these.

But still, the 68K is a dead issue.
It will never perform anywhere near as well as our current PPCs.

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Why not MorphOS already uses and has improved on AROS code. :)



[ Edited by terminills 23.08.2015 - 20:05 ]

The thing is I hate to admit it PPC itself is a dying technology. Long abandoned by both Motorola and IBM who created them. So for all we have this processing power. No major project is going to touch it with a bargepole.

So it becomes a niche project like all of the others out there. The only way to encourage anyone to get involved is to make it "free" and while MorphOS is still trying to sell the license as a viable entity (Which I am not complaining about). The interest is always going to be minor.

> Did Commodore do anything above an 030 itself?

The original A4000 came with 68040. The cheaper model with 68EC030 came only half a year later.

> PPC itself is [...] Long abandoned by both Motorola

Who cares about CPUs abandoned by Motorola when they spun out their CPU business 11 years ago into Freescale? Freescale has been bought by NXP recently but has yet to abandon Power Architecture officially. For instance, they just introduced a new multi-threaded Power Architecture core for automotive (e200z9).

> and IBM who created them.

No, IBM has certainly not abandoned Power Architecture. POWER8 is still rather new and POWER9 has already been announced.

Quote:

http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwmajstorovic_en.php

Power-Architecture is good but it's not for desktop machines since no supplier choose to use it on the market, i think the price is not the problem, if a big potential market exist ibm can afford low prices like for xbox360 and ps3 for very interesting processors.
The best chance is the opening of the power architecture, because one day a big chinese supplier may use it for the chinese market.
if they can build powerfull processors themselve so it could be interesting for them.

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Not particularly fast, that device.
And, as has been said before, no fpga project currently developed can outperform a fast 060.

@Andreas, thanks for the info.
I have always been impressed by the 040.
Motorola was still using that core after most 68K development had ceased.

As to PPCs, Motorola's offshoot Freescale continues to develop them (and IBM continues to move the Power line forward).

There are low cost PPCs that could be used.
Andreas has mentioned the e5500 cored T10XX line several times.
A board based on these would not be significantly more expensive than a custom X64 board.


[ Edited by Jim 23.08.2015 - 16:10 ]

Fair play IBM may support Power Architecture but in a server environment which is all IBM do now... The days of PPC as a viable desktop is no longer seen as a great option.

As for Freescale has been sinking for a long time.

Basically what I am trying to say is yep as a processor it may still hold value in embedded systems, but its mainstream run is pretty much pushing up the daisies :)

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Funny, because the Freescale e6500 core is used in processors that can run more threads than any Intel cpu.
Frescale's focus is on communications related applications, but they have not written off SBC applications.
And IBM's focus on Power8 doesn't limit that cpu to servers.

As an alternate to X64, only ARM is more common, and that has only recently adopted features PPC have had for a decade (64 bit operation, fast speeds, etc).

And, try and remember WE aren't "mainstream" either.

I finally realized why MorphOS Team wants to make MorphOS for X64 and possibly ARM but most likely X64, and not MIPS. ... There are not any MIPS software developers. Which means that there would not be any software for MorphOS.

I'm afraid the same might be true if MorphOS would expand its product line to support POWER Hardware.

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I'm not sure what you mean by that, but yes MIPS is pretty dead.
Even the Chinese are now shying away from that one.

And an X64 migration for MorphOS has already been announced.

ARM is not likely to happen.

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So you are claiming that the videos showing the 68k core for FPGA running at a speed equal to a 200MHz 68000 CPU are fakes? (not to mention the claims that newer and larger FPGA chips will allow 400MHz or greater speeds)

I agree that until something is released (such as the newer planned accelerator cards with larger FPGA chip) there is only the people who are beta testing the 68k core on the A600 Vampire accelerator cards. But even those limited accelerators are showing very fast speeds with a very small and older FPGA chip.

I think it is very harsh to call anyone a liar, specially when many demonstrations have been shown to dozens of people, and there are several beta testers who are using the new 68k core on their A600's with Vampire accelerators.

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A 200MHz 68000 is not particularly fast ;)

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a) the 68060 didn't exist when C= went under

b) the 68060 was a competetive CPU when it was first introduced

c) Motorola declared that the 68k series would end with the 060 forcing it's costumers to seek alternatives for future developments (Moto prefered them to take the PPC route)

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Depends on what you are comparing it to. Compared to a 7MHz 68000, the 200MHz+ 68k FPGA core with some 68020 instructions added is fairly impressive. What if they can get it to run at 400MHz to 500MHz, or faster?

When compared to my 2.7GHz G5 PowerMac tower, it is still slow, but much less difference than the wide gap between 7MHz and 2.7GHz.

But I still think that it is interesting to see what can be run using a fast FPGA with the 68k Apollo core. It may be that if/when the Apollo accelerator card(s) are released, original Amiga hardware might be able to run a decent web browser, as well as productivity software (if any is ported or written from scratch) and more demanding games that were not previously possible, even on an Amiga with a 68060. The Apollo team has stated that they also plan to provide improved graphic capabilities, but I don't know exactly what they have in mind, and I am sure it won't compete with modern video cards. This is going way off topic, and I really don't want to speculate on what might happen if/when the Apollo core is widely available, but IMO, it is interesting to me and a lot of existing Amiga users.

Quote:
Still not very fast :)

I'm of course nitpicking a bit, but a 400MHz _68000_ (with actual 68000 opcode timings) would still be slower than a 50MHz 68060. But if the timings are different, then it's not really a 68000 anymore, but merely 68000-compatible :)

> no supplier choose to use it on the market

A-Eon and ACube do ;-)

> The best chance is the opening of the power architecture

The Power ISA has been open (i.e. licensable) for over a decade. And several Power micro-architectures have been open (i.e. licensable) as well, such as IBM PPC4xx for over a decade, Freescale e200 for 8 years and IBM POWER more recently.

> because one day a big chinese supplier may use it for the chinese market. if they
> can build powerfull processors themselve so it could be interesting for them.

That's already reality in server space:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=9463&start=81

> the Freescale e6500 core is used in processors that can run more threads than any Intel cpu.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_microprocessors lists Intel CPUs with 24, 28, 30, 32 or 36 threads (24 threads from as early as June 2013).

> ARM [...] has only recently adopted features PPC have had for a decade
> (64 bit operation, fast speeds, etc).

It's been two decades for PPC already :-)

> I finally realized why MorphOS Team wants to make MorphOS for X64 and possibly ARM
> but most likely X64, and not MIPS. ... There are not any MIPS software developers.
> Which means that there would not be any software for MorphOS.

Software for MorphOS on PPC is written by MorphOS software developers, not by "PPC software developers". Likewise, software for MorphOS on MIPS wouldn't be written by "MIPS software developers". After all, almost no application or game developer is writing in Assembly language anymore.

> I'm afraid the same might be true if MorphOS would expand its product line
> to support POWER Hardware.

IBM POWER is usermode-compatible with the CPUs MorphOS currently runs on, so existing MorphOS binaries would work without change.

> MIPS is pretty dead. Even the Chinese are now shying away from that one.

Have Ingenic given up on their MIPS64 Xburst2 core?


Edit: Xburst2 eventually got released in 2020, but against expectations it's not MIPS64 but MIPS32.

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 10.01.2021 - 22:45 ]

My opinion is that the PPC based implementation also haven't reached the limits of the processor yet.

I think, the first step could be something that more ABoxs are executed in the same time. It could be fine, because all core could be used to execute an ABox, on independent memory areas and a crashing app would only freeze it's executing ABox and not the whole system. I don't know is this feasible or not... But could be great!

The change to x86/x64/ARM will suffer from the same problems: Memory limits, freezings, etc.