| Add Cores/IPs to the Vampire.core? | |
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Håkan Blomqvist
Posts 3
03 Sep 2021 12:12
| Now when Apple with it's M1 SoC and the latest Armv9 architecture both has a "Neural Engine" that is hardware optimized for tensors and a DSP for Audio work. I guess this is a questions for Gunnar von Boehn. Is it possible to add these two functionalities (similar) when it comes to the FPGA gates that is left on the VampireV4 FPGA? Is it something that Apollo would consider to add? The reason why I ask is that I would really like to run tensorflow + keras and run VSTs on a Apollo Vampire Standalone. I know it's a mammoth undertaking to do. But, is it something that might be done in the future or is it just NO. All the best and thank you for you time,
Håkan Blomqvist
Sweden
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Nick Fellows
Posts 180
03 Sep 2021 13:50
| No expert but what you are asking for is over and above what we could ever expect. If you are interested in ARM go check out the other project involving the raspberry pi whose name im not allowed to mention. What you are really asking for is a new Amiga up to the same level as tech as Apple for a fraction of the price. Which is a ludicrous proposition. We look to the future of the Amiga - I firmly believe that its future lies in AROS and Apollo team are doing good work here in contributing to that project and other open source software eg GCC. Investing in that by supporting their hardware is a good way to do that.
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Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6263
03 Sep 2021 20:44
| Håkan Blomqvist wrote:
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Is it something that Apollo would consider to add?
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So your question is adding a neural engine ?
Yes this is possible.
And I used to design neural engines.... in my real work life,
so yes we could do this not problem.
I actually even did develop a neural engine extension for 68k as test project.
So if you want to use 68k in automotive driving, I do have something ready for this...
You did not ask for adding an ARM core. And this was good.
As adding an ARM core would be make no sense at all, as ARM are much weaker clock by clock than Apollo 68080 and is very ugly to code, so it fits not at all in the spirit of nice coding 68K CPU of Amiga.
So yes adding a neural engine to 68k is in theory possible....
But this not helps us much for running Amiga OS...
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Andrew Miller
Posts 352
04 Sep 2021 00:56
| Elon Musk may be looking for a processor for his cars as he's not happy ARM is being acquired by Nvidia. (He has loads of money, maybe he'd invest in Apollo?)
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Håkan Blomqvist
Posts 3
04 Sep 2021 10:48
| Gunnar von Boehn wrote:
| | So your question is adding a neural engine ?
Yes this is possible.
And I used to design neural engines.... in my real work life,
so yes we could do this not problem.
I actually even did develop a neural engine extension for 68k as test project.
So if you want to use 68k in automotive driving, I do have something ready for this...
You did not ask for adding an ARM core. And this was good.
As adding an ARM core would be make no sense at all, as ARM are much weaker clock by clock than Apollo 68080 and is very ugly to code, so it fits not at all in the spirit of nice coding 68K CPU of Amiga.
So yes adding a neural engine to 68k is in theory possible....
But this not helps us much for running Amiga OS...
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Thank you for your answer Gunnar. Yes, I didn't ask for a ARM Core. The ARM Cores I mentioned was just to explain what I was asking for.
I asked for a "Neural Engine" that is kick ass on linear algebra and DSP for accelerating DSP stuff for Audio Engineering.
I understand that you have your reasons not to add a "Neural Engine" to the 68080 core. But adding a Vector Unit (instead of "Neural Engine") for SIMD would make a huge difference for both accelerating linear algebra and Sound Synthesis.
And I argue that a Vector Unit would help us running Amiga OS in the long run. As it would open up for future software development for the platform that might not be possible otherwise.
Again, a huge thanks for you answer Gunnar. I appreciate it :)
All the best,
Håkan Blomqvist
ps. Don't know if your interssted to know. But for me personaly, it's not about automotive driving. It's about generative adversarial networks (GAN) for graphics and audio production.
ds.
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Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6263
05 Sep 2021 06:15
| Håkan Blomqvist wrote:
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But adding a Vector Unit for SIMD would make a huge difference for both accelerating linear algebra and Sound Synthesis.
And I argue that a Vector Unit would help us running Amiga OS in the long run. As it would open up for future software development for the platform that might not be possible otherwise.
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Yes, a SIMD instruction set is very useful for many use cases.
And allows to accelerate many different programs and the OS. And this is why we did add a SIMD instructions set called AMMX to the 68080 already.
It allows us to accelerate the OS and many programs.
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Håkan Blomqvist
Posts 3
05 Sep 2021 15:01
| Gunnar von Boehn wrote:
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Yes, a SIMD instruction set is very useful for many use cases.
And allows to accelerate many different programs and the OS.
And this is why we did add a SIMD instructions set called AMMX to the 68080 already.
It allows us to accelerate the OS and many programs.
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Oh, didn't know that, thank you for you answer and time. Going to google AMMX docs and fire up my IDE for some coding then... :) All the best,
Håkan Blomqvist
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