22 Dec
1999
22 Dec
'99
6:46 a.m.
A followup to a previous discussion about Amigas, Palm Pilots, instruction
sets, etc.
--- Gareth Knight <gaz_k(a)onlyamiga.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
From: "Gareth Knight"
<gaz_k(a)onlyamiga.freeserve.co.uk>
To: <ethan_dicks(a)yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Motorola 68k family ( was Re: Comparison of system specs. )
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 23:24:37 -0000
Ethan Dicks
--
Gareth Knight
Amiga Interactive Guide http://aig.amiga.tm
Mystery of Life? I found it on Aminet!
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I did see Dave Haynie mention that there were
some fundamental differences
in the Dragonball that caused binary-level compatibility problems, but I
don't recall the specifics, either.
I had a look through the Team Amiga archives and found this. I would
appreciate it if you could forward it onto the list.
From: Dave Haynie <dhaynie(a)jersey.net>
To: <teamamiga(a)thule.no>
Sent: Friday, December 03, 1999 6:59 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: Re: [TA] Re: Look what those wily Atarians are up to!!!!
On Fri, 03 Dec 1999 15:33:49 +0100, "g'o'tz ohnesorge"
<gohnesorge@lh-compute
rtechnik.de> jammed all night, and by sunrise
was overheard remarking:
missing
Jim Mackoy schrieb:
> Unfortunately, I am not sure the 68040 or
68060 was ever
> reduced to VHDL file. The Coldfire was, and Dragonball,
> but these are pretty low performance compared to the the
> synthesizeable versions of Mips, x86, Sparc and PPC
> Sad, because in many way ways the 68K was the most complete
> and elegant microprocessor of the lot.
I don't think DragonBall or any other Motorola 68K variation is fully
synthesized -- Motorola made a fairly big to-do about the fact that
ColdFire is, whole chip. MIPS has a killer (for embedded stuff)
synthesizable core you can licence. I don't know of any decent x86 core
(there are probably low-end things, and you can find an 8052 core in the
public domain I think). I don't know any PPC offering, either internally
or as a licensable core. There are tons of ARM cores; like MIPS, it's
been simple enough to offer since back when these things had to be pretty
simple (due to weak VHDL compilers). Ed Hepler's company offers a whole
40MHz 68K compatible in VHDL.
> Sure. But something like ColdFire in VHDL is a start at least; the commands
could be added, and while they might be slower this way than a
"perfect" solution, they'd still be faster as a whole than any Amiga now
..
So far, Motorola's not actively licensing the core (don't know if that's
a "won't" or a "would, but not what we like to sell" thing), but
of
course the could if necessary for competition. Primarily, it's a way for
them to release new version with different features faster than in the
past. The did this without synthesis throughout the MC683xx line, using
standardized component modules (design and layout largely prefabbed, more
or less like standard cell), but it's much more efficient with VHDL. And
of course, this way, any I/O block you design for ColdFire could be
reused for PowerPC or any other design that comes along.
and cheap like a Nintendo GameBoy along the way.
That's a 6502-like thing.