@wawa

I think accelerator/CPU slot would have been handy also for x86.

It's not fun (or economical) to be forced to replace the whole working HW to get more speed. A lot of work (backups, re-installations, driver issues) involved.

Another good things have been AMP accelerators, like Newtec Screamer. They say that (for example) Blender GUI feels more responsive on AOS4 than on a high end mainstream system, we "only" need modern screamer.

About the topic, the davinci chip:
http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/dsp/platform/davinci/whats_new.page

Some oldschool way of acceleration:
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o164/Cyberstorm604e/A4000TowerBlock.jpg

Last edited by KimmoK on 16-Dec-2011 at 01:52 PM.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

cpu slot is a good idea alright, but you have to agree that upgrading part of hardware while keeping old bottlenecks is semi-optimal. example: cpu slot on a3-4k optimized for 030. worse chipram throughput with higher cpus. zorro 3 bus limiting factor especially for gfx output. summarizing: cpu slot was a trade off to ship machines with lowest posibble specs cpu and offload additional investment for an upgrade to the customer (same for a1200). not a long sighted strategy if you ask me, and its been proven.

@wawa

Surely one requirement for good result is that the basic system is good enough.

For A2000 the CPU slot was most usable. It brought 32bit RAM etc to the system.
http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a2630

IMHO, CBM Amigas have so far been the most flexible computers ever. If we had had RTG and RTA (alongside of custom chips) around 1991 the situation might have been perfect.

Last edited by KimmoK on 16-Dec-2011 at 02:09 PM.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@KimmoK

Quote:

IMHO, CBM Amigas have so far been the most flexible computers ever. If we had had RTG and RTA (alongside of custom chips) around 1991 the situation might have been perfect.

you would need a faster bus soon. the dumbest things were accels with no own ram, relaying on motherboard or zorro ram cards. but when putting ram on the card why not include own mass storage controller, and when you have that, why not include faster system bus (cyberstorm pci? expansion slot). soon you have a complete replacement computer on a card, with your olde motherboard as a dongle. as result you paid double for everything anyway. so why develop an accelerator if you will eventually be designing a whole system from the scratch?

what concerns 68k, such questions have been talked through over and over again. im not saying accels were bad thing. but they were sad necessity since commodore has produced only comperatively weak hardware themselves and didnt provide third party licensing. the most sane thing for the market was a powerfull and standalone clone with basic compatibility and no bottlenecks. that was draco. too late, too few, addressed too special aand limited customership (video editing), finally too expensive.

--now what comes to mind, parallel between dracos situation and x1k project is evident in my opinion. plenty good will, dediaction, money and skill involved in a project that likely will become complete rarity instead to satisfy larger user base.

@itix

Quote:

itix wrote: @AmigaBlitter There is still hell lot of data for DSP to process if you are using full HD video source at 60 FPS. It is only 16.7 milliseconds per frame. Especially if you want include colour information. Lowering resolution of course helps and when using VGA camera (640x480) or analog camera (720x288) you can build lot more real time applications for it. The DSP is programmable (obviously) and its instruction set is actually like any desktop CPU but just includes special instructions and techniques to boost algorithms. Nothing special there, really. It can be programmed using C/C++ and you have full access to all special features in C language using compiler extensions. We benchmarked that ARM core for GBit ethernet performance and results were only mediocre. Maybe TI drivers were just slow or something but apparently ARM core is not optimized for performance but low power consumption. Not bad for this chip though. Typically DSP would be used for video data processing and ARM core is used to master ethernet, USB, PCIe, video engines and so on.

Seems like you have real world experience from this chip and was nice to read about it. But as you know this is Amiga scene and all that will be handled as "NAY SAYER!".

This is one of problems Amiga scene haves now days. Person A states "We should make gold from s*it" Person B states "It's not possible". Crowd treats person A as a visionary and despises Person B because he "doesn't have faith".