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Documentation about the Vampire hardware

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Calaminici Davide

Posts 26
03 Nov 2020 21:56


Hello everyone,

just some question for the Apollo Team Members.

Could be possible to push the actual V4 up to... say 400 mhz?
How the core will scale if such frequency (or even higher 2ghz) will be reached?
What a possible V6 will look like? What about the Specs?
Is the 3D core developement proceedings and what functions are already implemented?
It's possible to implement some sort of Hyperthreading?

Another question:
Have the team received some sort of contact about the 68080 core, licensing, further development and so on...

Thank you very much
Kind regards




Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
04 Nov 2020 08:22


Calaminici Davide wrote:

Hello everyone,
   
just some question for the Apollo Team Members.
   
Could be possible to push the actual V4 up to... say 400 mhz?
How the core will scale if such frequency (or even higher 2ghz) will be reached?

 
The FPGA runs at its sensible max clock limit.
 
If we talk about Mhz then lets not forget that the Vampire V4 with Apollo 68080 CPU has today already the performance of an A500 overclocked to over 2 GHz (2100 MHz) using normal 68K instructions.
This means you get this 2 GHz performance without even using SIMD.
 
 
But lets not forget that the APOLLO 68080 CPU has the AMMX-SIMD instruction set for a good reason. Software using the SIMD instruction set can reach even a much higher speed. Depending on the algorithm you can get up to 10 times performance increase.
 
Programs making good use of the AMMX SIMD instructions like for example NEOGEO emulator will reach today speeds comparable with an Amiga 500 over clocked to about 20 GHz (20,000 MHz).
 
The 68080 in the V4 FPGA provides more performance than any AMIGA ever before.
We think much more software will make use of AMMX SIMD in the future and benefit from big performance boosts.
Enhancing software to run a few times faster makes to me a lot sense - maybe more sense than selling users a lot more expensive FPGAs.
What do you think?


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
04 Nov 2020 08:40


Calaminici Davide wrote:

What a possible V6 will look like? What about the Specs?

We have no plans for a V6.
I think the V4 is very good as it is and our focus is to improve software.
I think with software using SIMD Amiga can be made much much faster.
And this for all existing Vamp users - without the need to pay for extra hardware.
 
Calaminici Davide wrote:

Is the 3D core developement proceedings and what functions are already implemented?

Yes we did some early 3D demos.
Right now our focus in on other also important topics like ApollOS, polishing AGA games, and bringing out some new games using AMMX.
 
 
Calaminici Davide wrote:

It's possible to implement some sort of Hyperthreading?

Yes, actually APOLLO Core was designed with Hyperthread support.
But Hyperthreading is today an unused feature on AMIGA, as Amiga OS as you know can not supports this.
This is a features which maybe we can use in the future.



Calaminici Davide

Posts 26
09 Nov 2020 20:34


Thank you for the reply.
Have to say the team have done a great work.
I hope to see a more faster card in terms of native speed or clock and to see a good 3D instructions implementation.

Is it possibile to design the FPGA to host some sort of bridge for a coprocessor? Perhaps another FPGA that users can simply plugin into the actual card that communicate to the main FPGA with an appropriate link. Thinking about something like OpenCapi.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/userspace-api/accelerators/ocxl.html#:~:text=OpenCAPI%20is%20an%20interface%20between,memory%20coherently%2C%20using%20virtual%20addresses.

What about the last question: some company contacted the apollo team?

Thank you all



Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
09 Nov 2020 23:53


Calaminici Davide wrote:

  I hope to see a more faster card in terms of native speed 
 

 
My goal is to improving the existing cards the people have now.

1) I like continous Core improvment very much.
Our goal is to tune the core a little more
and to give people for XMAS another free 5-10 MIPS update.
 
2) I believe that Software can get huge speed by making better use of AMMX.
I see here potential for "free" several hundreds percent speed increase.

posts 5