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Sonnet 7200 and Vampire4000 Together?

Crow Mohikan

Posts 78
15 Feb 2017 11:32


Hi.
    I have A4000, mediator 4000di mk3 3v,Radeon9200/128mb and sonnet7200g3/500.
    when I throw my A3660mmu/fpu away and plug vampire4000, can I use them together?
  WOS applications on Sonnet, 68K on vampire.
    Thanks.
   


Michal Warzecha

Posts 209
15 Feb 2017 12:31


No, if Sonnet can work with genuine motorola CPU as a cooprocessor, then I think yes. But no one know exactly how V4000 will be working or even it will be available for sure. You need to wait for some first release and then ask.


Wawa T

Posts 695
15 Feb 2017 13:20


i think it might work, but first you would have a get your hands on sonnet and then on a vampire4000.
 
  then there will be a question if it pays off, because for the amiga the sonnet will be still behind a zorro3 bus, mediator connect to the amiga through, communicating at 7mb/s in pio. this restriction and tha cost of the context switches may be kind of prohibitive in comparison to what vampire itself may deliver. from the benchmarks it doesnt look that the sonnet ppc is so much ahead, and this is an outdated, hard to come by, set in stone hardware in comparison to vampire under active development, with its pretty unexpected (id even say groundbreaking) consequences, like tha late dma speedup for the genuine a600 interface.
 
however this subject provokes a few questions, what concerns possibility of implementation of vampire on a4k/a3k systems. one of which is the hardware-hardcoded limit of amount for ram addressable on cpu slot. according to mamory map it is 128mb. which makes it bit qestionable if such an effort pays of. it desnt look as if this could be overcome, except by some magic from the team, like placing the vampire in a zorro instead of cpu slot and taking advantage of zorro address space, if that even is possible. perhaps these considerations lead the team to lean towards a standalone instead of another extension.


Gregthe Canuck

Posts 274
15 Feb 2017 13:38


Is that 128MB limit a software limit or a hardware limit? (i.e. no more pins available on CPU slot)

Update: Found nice slot reference here: EXTERNAL LINK 
All 32 address lines are on the slot. However on page 7 this info isn't encouraging:

    "Local Bus Slot slaves are not autoconfigured as are Zorro III bus devices, but instead
are fixed in the address range from $08000000 to $0fffffff. The A3000 local bus controller, the
Fat Gary chip, provides a decode of this space on the signal /RAMSLOT which is valid at
address time. This signal may be ignored and the address decoded by logic on the board if speed
is an issue. Local slave devices should also support the signal /CIIN if they contain uncachable
data. The Amiga OS expects anything mapped starting at $08000000 to be memory, and in fact,
the fastest memory in the A3000 system. The OS will automatically size and link in any
memory it finds here, and place it in the system as the highest priority memory available."




Wawa T

Posts 695
15 Feb 2017 15:30


yes, i have been asking around and it is implementation bound chipset limitation of particular amiga hardware. thats the reason an a1200 blizzard can take 256mb but cs cannot. a1200 hat other bottlenecks in turn..


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
15 Feb 2017 23:18


AMIGA has no limitation on the memory.
Having more memory on the Vampire is no problem at all.



Gregthe Canuck

Posts 274
15 Feb 2017 23:48



OK that's good news, however you manage to do it. :)

(Hoping some day for a V3000/V4000)



Jan Vonka

Posts 60
17 Feb 2017 09:55


Vampire 4000 is not out, so we can only speculate what it will do.

WOS is very old these days and almost nobody makes SW for it. Playing with Sonnet on WOS is fine but more like a hobby. It seems nobody is going to make Quake3, Netsurf or MPlayer for it. If Sonnet would be supported by OS4, MorphOS or Linux, then it would be really cool to have this combo in one classic machine (fast OS3.X and fast NG OS).

We will see there are guys saying they can try to reproduce Sonnet cards as a small serie because it is only a CPU+RAM board without any ROM.


Eric Gus

Posts 477
17 Feb 2017 18:58


gregthe canuck wrote:

  OK that's good news, however you manage to do it. :)
 
  (Hoping some day for a V3000/V4000)
 

I too would love to see a Amiga 3000 compatible vampire, that machine really could use it..  I know personally i'd love to have one in my A3000.


Crow Mohikan

Posts 78
17 Feb 2017 20:59


Me too. With or without sonnet, I need vampire I think on my 4000 because a3660's gals are very hot working or other accelerators hot and or with fan. Their hot air runnig on the box. Vampire is not hot and not need fan so i must think my computer's life. Firstly mainboard's caps then others. I think 3000/4000 needs very much to vampire.


Marcus Gerards

Posts 58
22 Feb 2017 13:52


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

AMIGA has no limitation on the memory.
  Having more memory on the Vampire is no problem at all.
 

That's theory, unfortunately. In practice, current 3.x does not have 32bit support beyond $8000.0000.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
22 Feb 2017 14:23


Marcus Gerards wrote:

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  AMIGA has no limitation on the memory.
  Having more memory on the Vampire is no problem at all.
 
 

 
  That's theory, unfortunately. In practice, current 3.x does not have 32bit support beyond $8000.0000.

But Marcus this is 2 GB.
To question here was if there is an artificial 128 MB limit.




Marcus Gerards

Posts 58
22 Feb 2017 15:09


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  But Marcus this is 2 GB.
  To question here was if there is an artificial 128 MB limit.
 

Sorry, I missed that. But how would you map the memory for a Vampire 4000?

The processor slot seems to be limited to 128 MB for the A3/4000 machines and the Vampire would be (apart from PPC) the first accelerator which has enough power to justify more memory.



Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
22 Feb 2017 15:40


Marcus Gerards wrote:

The processor slot seems to be limited to 128 MB for the A3/4000 machines and the Vampire would be (apart from PPC) the first accelerator which has enough power to justify more memory.

There are several options.

One option could to
a) map 256 MB form $0 to $0FFFF.FFFF
b) map the rest in Zorro 3 space



Wawa T

Posts 695
22 Feb 2017 15:43


To question here was if there is an artificial 128 MB limit.

 
  according to what ive been told the limit of memory accessible via a4k/a3k processor slot is hardwired into the amiga chipset of those particular machines.
 
  heres my source, the #30 post of mastatabs:
EXTERNAL LINK


Ian Parsons

Posts 230
22 Feb 2017 16:05


What business is it of the custom chips how much local memory the CPU board has?


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
22 Feb 2017 17:49


wawa t wrote:

To question here was if there is an artificial 128 MB limit.

   
    according to what ive been told the limit of memory accessible via a4k/a3k processor slot is hardwired into the amiga chipset of those particular machines.
 
  heres my source, the #30 post of mastatabs:
  EXTERNAL LINK 

No, this is a misunderstanding.
You can map 240 MB of fastmem in the the space from
$0000.0000 to $0FFF.FFFF

In the Z3 space from
$1000.0000 to $8000.0000
you map again 1750 MB

So you can fit roughly 2 Gigabyte in the AMIGA today - without patching the OS.

If you would patch the AMIGA OS, then you could fit even more.
But who needs more anyway?



M Rickan

Posts 177
22 Feb 2017 21:10


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  If you would patch the AMIGA OS, then you could fit even more.
  But who needs more anyway?

I vaguely recall a famous quote from Bill Gates on memory needs. ;)



Wawa T

Posts 695
23 Feb 2017 01:30


@gunnar

sure there is availablle room in the memory map. the question is it accessible via cpu slot/bus.  i think at least z3 space isnt, except with some hardware mod. and the rest may still contain some other bits, but i dont know exact details. which might leave us with the very 128mb im talking about.

being no expert, i dont insist on this, simply put it in for consideration.

posts 19