Vojin Vidanovic (Needs Verification) Posts 1916/ 1 09 Sep 2018 21:03
| Tim D wrote:
| So do we have sort of an AOS 4.1 FE A1222 Tabor deja-vu????? |
I DONT SEE any similarities between a) Steven lagging on buggy SATA drivers (as well as for x5000) and brothers lagging on adding another PPC to OS (even I suppose they were aware of Tabors CPU Before us) AND b) Adopting FPGA cores from one board to another. There were few unexpected events (like in Civ) that delayed the things, but did not destroy it completely. - Majsta got Kippers job because of some Chinese faulty parts delivery. Ah, effects of globalization! - There were serious A500 bugs with V4 cards that prevented using it or similar (timing issues?) - It seems that Cyclones aren't as portable as Altera claims in their promo, but yet should be easier then porting to completely other FPGA board (like some proposed at some points of time). Good thing is meanwhile GOLD2 core outlived itself with 11th release bringing nice improvements. Even GOLD3 isn't out, its getting ironed day by day. So things aren't best, but not worse either. CORE 2.11 featsOLD2.11 will introduce some very interesting feature like blitter improvement, which should fix lot of badly written games running on WHDLoad that where messing with IRQ a bit too much. FPU has also been improved by a large margin: we were able to use bit of remaining FPGA space to extend precision of FPU up to 50Bit. This improvement fixes Elude RTG demos that were affected by the « date bug » reported on A1k. MacOS emulation was also affected by this (you could see it when running Warcraft 2, intro movie was a slideshow). Kiero helped us to address this issue and we thank him for that, thanks man! We also introduced Out-of-Order execution on FPU instructions, which speeds up operation by another great margin when software takes advantage of it. For example, POVray likes it very much and calculation is now faster on 3D rendering scenes. Team is also working on ICache Prefetch. This feature will also speed up lot of programs that can take advantage of it. This one is not trivial and need to be implemented conscientiously to not introduce unwanted behaviour. If it gets good enough, it will make its way in GOLD2.11. All in one, we are super excited about bringing GOLD2.11 to all, it will make Vampire V2 even faster while improving compatibility with old games.
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