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Documentation about the Vampire hardware

Vampire and ARM

Jay West

Posts 2
07 Mar 2023 16:53


The Vampire is a cool device, but I was thinking about open source software ports like Libreoffice.

For future vampire cards, if they had ARM chips included onboard as co-processors, like with the 68k and PowerPC was, would this make porting ARM versions of software worthwhile? Could the arm chips be used for other stuff like video playback?

Thanks.

Jay.



Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6197
07 Mar 2023 18:36


Jay West wrote:

The Vampire is a cool device, but I was thinking about open source software ports like Libreoffice.
 
For future vampire cards, if they had ARM chips included onboard as co-processors, like with the 68k and PowerPC was, would this make porting ARM versions of software worthwhile? Could the arm chips be used for other stuff like video playback?
 
Thanks.
 
Jay.

 
 
 
Hello Jay,
 
Actually we are very happy that we have the 68080 CPU.
The Apollo 68080 CPU is much nicer and better to program than both PowerPC and ARM.
 
As you will know the 68080 is CISC CPU this means it has very powerful instruction and excellent addresmodee to use.
This makes is very nice and easy to program.
 
Maybe you know that POWERPC and ARM are only RISC CPUs.
RISC designs do sacrifice the performance of a CISC CPU for being easier and cheaper to produce than a powerful CISC.
 
Maybe you know that one 68K instruction are very strong and can do a lot work in a single instruction, for doing the same amount of work
on a weaker RISC CPU you need in often many instructions.
 
This could be that you need for example 3 or 6 PowerPC or ARM instruction for doing the same work as a SINGLE 68k instruction.
 
If you are aware of this then you will fully understand that the 68080 easily outperforms ARM chips of the same clock.

-

You are right the idea to have an Amiga with an "cheap" PowerPC CPU added as workslave was tried before.
And as you might recall this idea failed badly.

First of all Amiga OS does not support more than 1 CPU.
It would support more than 1 CPU - then certainly the most cleanest and best solution would be to have 2 68K CPU.
As all Amiga software could then run on both.

I should clear that having 2 different CPU is software wise a very complex situation = a mess.
And if you try to mix CPU of different ENDIAN then you get into even more messy situation.

And adding another CPU to your system will not allow you to run more software. To run a WORDPROGRAM on you need to port this software to AMIGA! When you have ported it - then you can compile it for 68K.




Jay West

Posts 2
13 Mar 2023 22:58


Hello Gunnar

Thanks for your reply. I see your point in hindsight about the PowerPC combination.

How about the 68080 runnning something like the Box86 program so it can emulate and run x86 linux programs which don't require big amounts of RAM and CPU resources?


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6197
14 Mar 2023 05:59


Jay West wrote:

How about the 68080 runnning something like the Box86 program so it can emulate and run x86 linux programs which don't require big amounts of RAM and CPU resources?

 
Please mind that we run Amiga OS / Apollo OS and ATARI EMUTOS.
Box is a program to run x86 Linux program on another Linux!
Box will not work on Amiga OS.
 
If you want to use the common very useful GNU tools like
for example: TAR, GREP, BZIP, WGET or GCC and so on
then is no problem at all. These tools are available for Amiga OS as well - and run natively. So there is no need to emulate them.
 

As you will know LINUX has a complete different philosophy than AMIGA OS. We appreciate the lightweights of Amiga OS over Linux.
We appreciate how elegant you can program on Amiga OS and that you can code without the limitations and restrictions of Linux.
Linux is good for certain areas but is not what we like to use on Amiga. We like the swift and elegant Amiga OS.

If you want to run Linux then you are wrong here. ;-)

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