[HN Gopher] Apollo 68080 - Motorola 680x0 High Performance Proce...
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Apollo 68080 - Motorola 680x0 High Performance Processor in FPGA
Author : rbanffy
Score : 110 points
Date : 2021-08-31 15:18 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apollo-core.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apollo-core.com)
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Impressive! Are new systems based on the 68k line still being
| made?
| mnw21cam wrote:
| There are still systems lying around that these can be plugged
| into, giving the performance improvements with full backwards-
| compatibility and the original chipsets.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Not really. The vast majority of the 68k series -- and in
| particular, all of the higher-performance parts -- have been
| out of production for many years. Some 68000 variants are still
| available, but are "not recommended for new designs" and are
| likely to be discontinued once supplies run out.
| zwieback wrote:
| If you count the Coldfire as part of the 68k line then yes,
| fairly popular microcontroller. Basically a reduced 68K
| instruction set. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NXP_ColdFire
| fredoralive wrote:
| NXP have the Coldfire line under a "Legacy" section of their
| website, which doesn't exactly indicate it has a great future
| though.
|
| I doubt many people would be picking it for new designs
| nowadays.
| rvense wrote:
| I think there are places that are invested in them. If you
| have an in-house software stack (possibly in assembly or
| with significant parts written in assembly) and years of
| expertise and familiarity, moving to ARM is maybe not worth
| the investment.
|
| I don't know what "Legacy" means to NXP, exactly. They're
| probably not making new, compatible cores. But if you're
| buying more than a few hundred per year you're likely to be
| able to do it for a while yet. Microchip, I know, use the
| phrase "customer-driven obsolescence", which means that as
| long as people are buying the chips they will keep making
| them. They still have a few 5V programmable logic devices
| that are maybe 25 years old but still available in onesies,
| and some from that series that I've heard they make as a
| sort of "print on demand" system if you buy the 500 or
| however many are in one batch. In general obsolescence in
| embedded hardware is very different to PC software,
| especially the kind that's normally discussed here.
| zwieback wrote:
| Definitely true. Also, investment in on-chip peripherals
| can lock companies into an architecture much longer than
| on higher-level platforms. We spent a lot of time
| debugging DMA, SPI, interrupt controllers, etc. on a
| micro platform and that work is not something we'd want
| to redo.
|
| Basically, in embedded products you end up touching
| everything from the app, OS (if there is one), device
| drivers all the way down to the on-chip peripherals.
| wildlogic wrote:
| I almost used Coldfire last year for a life-critical
| application.
| system2 wrote:
| "This CPU that's on the Vampire is the best CPU I've ever had
| in an Amiga"
|
| Don't expect it to beat Apple M1 anytime soon.
| rvense wrote:
| > Don't expect it to beat Apple M1 anytime soon.
|
| Who cares. The software for this one is better (:
| cestith wrote:
| Are you releasing an Amiga powered by the Apple M1?
| icedchai wrote:
| I have one of these. It's fun to play around with. You can
| download Amiga OS distros (one is called "Coffin") with tons
| of old apps and games already preinstalled. It takes me back
| to my youth.
|
| It's not intended to be a replacement for a modern desktop.
| But it is impressive if you're into the retrocomputing /
| emulation scene.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| The Apple M1 isn't an FPGA
|
| Or an Amiga CPU
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| "Today, the 680x0 is still used by industrial machines, the
| aircraft industry, cars vendors and fans of retro-computing
| around the world." it's right there above the fold
| duskwuff wrote:
| That statement might have been true when it was first
| written. It isn't anymore -- nobody is seriously using the
| 68000 in new hardware designs. Parts availability is limited,
| and is only going to get more so in the future.
| unixhero wrote:
| A friend and colleague who is a hardcore electrical engineer
| swears by 68K chips because he almost adores its instruction
| set. Says coding the assembly on them is superior to any
| other option for medium to large use cases.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The 68k has an excellent instruction set but imho it
| suffers from two things: a) It's big-endian. This is a bit
| of a religious thing, but in the end little-endian won out,
| and probably for good reasons. It's arguably easier to read
| a big-endian hexdump but harder for the processor itself to
| manage and harder for some bit twiddling. b) Separate
| "data" and "address" register sets. Awkward to program, and
| makes the instruction set more complicated.
|
| Looking back, the similar but not nearly as successful
| NS320xx architecture was better. Atari apparently even
| prototyped it for use in what became the (68k based) Atari
| ST, but the first chips produced in that series were too
| buggy.
|
| Both the 68k series and the NS32k series were heavily
| 'inspired' by the VAX.
|
| One thing that makes the 68k cool is that it's about as
| "retro" of an architecture as you can get that still
| supports a modern C/C++ toolchain. GCC still (mostly)
| supports it.
| kabdib wrote:
| I worked on the ST and helped evaluate the NS32032/32016.
| We started counting clock cycles for various operations
| and got some bad vibes, and then we started finding out
| about chip bugs (definitely not pretty, and National was
| coy about them and just said stuff like "we're working on
| it"), we so decided to use the 68K.
|
| The NS parts were really a due-diligence affair, and we
| looked at them just to make sure we weren't missing out
| on something really great (we weren't).
|
| Definitely a prettier architecture than the 68K, with
| better toolchains and development support at the time.
| Didn't make up for the bad, though.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Thanks, I always appreciate it when you chime in. Looking
| back, did Atari Corp actually build any hardware
| (prototype, wirewrap, etc.) with the 320xx? Or was it
| just evaluation from the POV of reading datasheets and
| the like? I've heard conflicting stories around this.
|
| That and the story about Atari talking with Microsoft
| about an early version of Windows for their hardware.
| kabdib wrote:
| Whether or not anyone wire-wrapped a board (pretty sure
| no one did), we didn't write a single line of code for
| the National parts. There were a number of visits by
| National sales reps and they dropped a lot of
| documentation on us, though. We were generally doubtful
| that the chip would be fast enough, and needed to make a
| processor decision very quickly; in late July 1984 we
| were talking about it, and I don't recall anything past
| August or so. By October the software folks were mostly
| in Monterey with a bunch of 68K-based systems.
|
| Another factor in the 68K's favor was that it was pretty
| easy to buy off-the-shelf 68K-based workstations (e.g.,
| Motorola VME-10, the Apple Lisa), which let us do 4-5
| months of software development while waiting for the
| actual ST hardware.
| pklausler wrote:
| There's some upside to having multiple register sets,
| though, and many quite successful ISAs have used them to
| good effect (CDC 6600, Cray-1/-2, &c.). It gives you more
| registers without having to use more bits for
| designators.
| karmakaze wrote:
| This is so true, and also the reason for them being less
| popular. The 6502 wasn't nice like the 6809. Intel ISA is a
| mess but was simpler in hardware than M68K.
|
| "IBM considered the 68000 for the IBM PC but chose the
| Intel 8088 because the 68000 was not ready; Walden C.
| Rhines wrote that thus "Motorola, with its superior
| technology, lost the single most important design contest
| of the last 50 years" -- Wikipedia
|
| Too bad we missed out on M68K IBM PCs, but in the end Macs
| ended up running x86 (ARM next I suppose).
| jsymolon wrote:
| The corollary is the same thing happening which caused
| Apple to move to the Intel CPUs, basically, Motorola
| being unable to squeeze more performance out of it.
|
| On the other hand, with the volume of units that IBM
| Compatibles had, it may have allowed more resources to
| push that boundary.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > it may have allowed more resources to push that
| boundary.
|
| For a long time, x86 was a joke when compared to PPC. As
| it was compared to 68K's right up to the 68040.
|
| And, as such things go, it was until it wasn't. Now, the
| tables have turned and ARM is proving easier to tweak
| into higher performance designs.
| ch_123 wrote:
| Fun fact: IBM released a 68k microcomputer aimed at the
| laboratory market in 1982. It faded away into obscurity,
| largely because it was more expensive than the PC, and
| sold into a role which the PC was more than capable of
| handling.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_9000
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Says coding the assembly on them is superior to any
| other option for medium to large use cases.
|
| I still have a preliminary instruction set manual for the
| 68000 printed in 1979. At that time I was learning 8080A
| machine code. When I saw that book the hardware became
| something I HAD to get my hands on eventually. I finally
| got to code one in assembly in college and it was every bit
| as enjoyable as I had imagined.
|
| BTW my dad wrote a disassembler for the 8080 in basic, and
| to simplify everything he rewrote all the mnemonics in a
| far simpler form than the official syntax from Intel. I
| still have the 16x16 instruction map. Because of that, the
| 68000s primary advantage was the increased number of
| registers and their 32bit size along with some better
| instructions. The pain of proper 8080 syntax was never a
| thing for me.
| mark-r wrote:
| I wrote a disassembler for 68k in 68k assembler. It was
| part of a home brew monitor, so you could show the code
| you were executing.
| cxr wrote:
| > my dad wrote a disassembler for the 8080 in basic, and
| to simplify everything he rewrote all the mnemonics in a
| far simpler form than the official syntax from Intel
|
| If you or he still has his notes, would you be able to
| ZIP them up and upload them to archive.org?
| phkahler wrote:
| >> If you or he still has his notes, would you be able to
| ZIP them up and upload them to archive.org?
|
| Not sure why, we were the only 2 people on earth to ever
| use that. To summarize, he used single letters for verbs
| and then single letters for register names: a, b,c, d,e,
| h,l for the 8-bit registers and x,y,z for the 16 bit
| pairs (b,c) (d,e) (h,l). It turns out you could always
| figure out some implied stuff. MAY was move a to y, but
| since A is 8 bits and Y is 16 this meant Y was an
| address, whereas MAD would be move A to D as an 8 bit
| register-to-register copy. This lead to all mnemonics
| being 3 characters or less. There could also be 8 or 16
| bit immediate values. The disassembler used a 4 byte
| decode table - 3 characters and a size (0,1,2) of the
| immediate data. It was super clean. I'll post is
| somewhere some day. I still have my Interact computer in
| its original box waiting to find a nice museum somewhere.
| And lots of tapes including a bunch of little kid created
| basic programs. Hard copies of all the "Interaction"
| newsletters from the local users group too.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| Back in the nineties I heard that, although the SNES had
| more capabilities in the way of color and 3D, "hard core"
| devs like David Perry could get better raw performance out
| of the 68000-based Sega Genesis for similar reasons.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Clock for clock a 6502/65816 would outperform a 68000 at
| raw byte moving and responding to interrupts, _but_ the
| 68k would smoke it on anything involving heavy integer
| calculations especially 16-bit or 32-bit integers or
| anything involving longer words.
|
| So as games got more complex, and clock rates higher, a
| 68k would definitely outperform.
|
| The 6502 is very cycle efficient and its ridiculously
| small register makes it fast to respond to interrupts,
| which I guess in a game machine is a good thing. But
| machines like the Amiga, Sharp X68000, and lots of arcade
| games packed in a bunch of custom video hardware too.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The 68000, with its neat ISA, linear address space and
| large register set, is much easier to program than a
| 6502/65816. All other things (SDKs, dev hardware) being
| equal, will result in more, better games hitting the
| market at a faster cadence.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The 68k insn set is a rather traditional CISC architecture,
| there's not much that makes it "superior" to modern
| designs. It's comparatively simple because it never really
| got extended beyond recognition as other architectures have
| been, but other than that I can't see any reason to
| recommend it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| creamytaco wrote:
| This is a proprietary core from a hobbyist/retro mainly Amiga
| team (nothing to do with Motorola) that has had quite a lot of
| murkyness associated with it.
|
| There have been accusations of this being simply a Coldfire
| ripoff based on leaked information [1] but also a lot of people
| have complained that they delete critical posts from their web
| forum and discord.
|
| The core is buggy and not really fully compatible with Motorola
| processors. They've also implemented their own extensions (AMMX).
| The Amiga scene has had countless peddlers of proprietary
| hardware, trying to vendor lock-in a substantial userbase. My
| opinion is that people are better served with Mister FPGA which
| is completely open and/or other open solutions (The Buffee
| project, PiStorm).
|
| [1] https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=102586
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I've said it before here, but I'll say it again: from the
| outside looking in this seems to be an ailment affecting the
| Amiga community more than retro communities. On other retro
| machines so much is open sourced or rewritten now, but on the
| Amiga there seems to be some fantasy that people are going to
| be making money there. Lots of proprietary closed stuff.
|
| I mean, MiST/MiSTer comes out of the Atari ST community, for
| example. That's what it was originally designed for, an ST
| core, and all the vhdl is open source.
| grahamlee wrote:
| It's actually not a fantasy. AmigaOS 3.2 was released this
| year as a commercial product, and Apollo make enough money to
| employ Gunnar full time and some part time folks too. Giving
| a niche community exactly the things they want will never be
| unicorn territory but it can produce liveable income.
|
| There is also the open source stuff: for example Apollo have
| abandoned CoffinOS due to licensing issues and are now
| developing ApolloOS, which is a fork of AROS, which is an
| open source reimplementation of AmigaOS. Free Software ideas
| aren't as prevalent as I'd like in the Amiga community but
| they are there (plenty of GNU software was ported to Amiga
| via ixemul.library so they've always been there).
| rbanffy wrote:
| While you can maintain one or two people out of this
| market, it won't be much more than that.
|
| The Amiga community will be better off with fully open
| source community projects.
| [deleted]
| amatecha wrote:
| I mean, this seems really cool, but their website situation is a
| total mess. Broken links:
|
| http://www.apollo-core.com/faq.html (top-level nav item)
|
| http://www.apollo-core.com/index.html (top-level nav item)
|
| http://www.apollo-core.com/apollOS.html (linked to from the
| bottom of http://www.apollo-core.com/features.html )
|
| Clicking Learn More takes me to https://wiki.apollo-
| accelerators.com/
|
| Then I somehow found my way to http://www.apollo-
| core.com/index.htm which has a completely different top-level
| navigation. What?
|
| And then I click Order and it takes me to http://www.apollo-
| computer.com/ , in a new tab. Can you just have stuff on one
| domain (with an SSL certificate) and consolidate information /
| headers / footers? It's also concerning there's an entire forum
| (with tens of thousands of messages) with no https...
| soapdog wrote:
| http://www.apollo-core.com/apollOS.html is 404 now. I wonder
| what it had there.
| chmod775 wrote:
| A "learn more" link to that broken page has the title: "Open-
| source OS for Amiga. Finally."
| terlisimo wrote:
| Wait till you're in line for the order.
|
| Then you get an email from a domain that has "apollo" in it but
| is not mentioned or linked to anywhere on the main site. The
| person sending the email says your order is ready and asks you
| to send ~500 EUR to some personal bank account in Ireland.
|
| Uhh... no? I've said thanks, but let's use paypal and I'll
| cover the extra fees. The idea was that if it turns out to be a
| scam I can get the money back.
|
| In the end everything was fine. Got the V1200, it worked. Also
| I got some candy, yay! But yeah, the whole process seemed a bit
| sketchy.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I've come across this in the past when researching modern 68k
| CPUs.
|
| Pretty cool. It's too bad there's not more energy put into
| manufacturing legacy hardware with modern processes... something
| like a Pi Zero sized 68k machine capable of running System 7.5 or
| Mac OS 8 (which handle monochrome displays well) hooked up to an
| e-ink display in an ultrabook case would make for a very
| compelling writing/focus machine... it'd boot nearly instantly
| from modern storage and would have resource usage in the ballpark
| of that of a headless Linux install while sporting a full UI.
| jll29 wrote:
| > something like a Pi Zero sized 68k machine capable of running
| ... hooked up to an e-ink display in an ultrabook case would
| make for a very compelling writing/focus machine
|
| I had a similar idea for a portable writing/focus sub-notebook,
| except using Linux rather than MacOS. At the time, e-ink
| displays weren't good enough, but now they are nearly there in
| terms of refresh rate.
|
| I was thinking of an appliance that would mostly be used for
| editing text, a A5-format or 10" sub-notebook with a very good
| keyboard and e-ink screen, and potentially one-week long
| battery life (due to a low-power CPU and the fact that e-ink
| doesn't consume electricity unless there is a change).
|
| The iPad isn't a competitor to this in the sense that it has no
| or no good keyboard and a poor screen for
| writing/reading/editing text professionally (glossy, no e-paper
| quality).
| opencl wrote:
| Not as cool but if you really want to run System 7.5 on an
| e-ink display you can already run a Mac emulator on an ebook
| reader today.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/kJRCR
| tomxor wrote:
| That is awesome :D I know it should work... it's too easy to
| make work today, but I can't help imagine being back in the
| 90s and showing someone classic MacOS running on a tablet. It
| would blow their mind.
|
| Also the e-ink display running classic is very reminiscent of
| one of the early LCD displays in this old thing:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable
| wk_end wrote:
| You kidding? That's incredibly cool. What are the refresh
| rates like?
| opencl wrote:
| A lot of e-ink devices just run Android so it's relatively
| easy to run whatever you want on them.
|
| Refresh rate depends on how much of the screen is updating
| at once. Scrolling a whole page is pretty bad, updating a
| small region is reasonably quick. Some devices have an 'A2
| mode' that makes it somewhat faster by just doing
| black/white instead of grayscale.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I mean, classic Macs didn't exactly have turbo charged
| refresh anyways. Yes, things like scrolling chunks of
| text is probably faster on an actual first-gen Mac than
| an e-Ink screen, but they weren't really... turbo for
| graphics rendering.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| This is amazing. Do you have more info on how to do this?
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Older processors were not necessarily more energy efficient
| than newer ones. I'm willing to bet you'd get better battery
| life out of something like a modern ARM Cortex-A than any 68k,
| FPGA-implemented or otherwise, and have it be significantly
| more powerful besides. But IANA processor nerd.
| musha68k wrote:
| You might be interested in this core:
| https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/MacPlus_MiSTer
| fnord77 wrote:
| Fixing all the security vulns of an old system like macos 7.5
| would take a long time.
| flatiron wrote:
| If you air gap it why would it matter?
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| Probably not possible if you want to directly run a modern
| web experience on it. Classic macOS has effectively no memory
| protection.
| rbanffy wrote:
| If you go back far enough, you'll need someone who knows how
| to make an RCE over AppleTalk.
|
| Probably doable, BTW. Office (and home) networks were much
| less hostile back then.
| fnord77 wrote:
| Another issue with classic macos - cooperative multitasking
| is prone to system hangs
| rbanffy wrote:
| True. Once you overflow a buffer, you own the machine.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| For a writing machine, it would be preferable to keep it
| offline so security issues wouldn't matter.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Yes, but Wikipedia and Google are very handy. Addictive
| websites not so much.
| titzer wrote:
| Having an order of magnitude (maybe two) fewer lines of code
| goes a long way to having fewer vulnerabilities. Given the
| longer and more rigid development cycle and smaller attack
| surface, it's reasonable to think there are relatively few
| defects.
| spijdar wrote:
| Fixing the security vulns in a non-networked computer would
| also be a lot less critical...
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| No doubt, but vulnerabilities aren't too much of a concern
| for a permanently offline machine, as something oriented
| toward focus probably would be.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| A fpga platform as the ultimate emulator would be really cool.
| Asyou say, in a pi sized package even cooler.
|
| Only a miniscule market, but still...
| wk_end wrote:
| Boy do I have something neat for you:
|
| https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| Here is review of such a device:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dibLXWdX5-M&t=1037s
| rbanffy wrote:
| > It's too bad there's not more energy put into manufacturing
| legacy hardware with modern processes...
|
| You can try http://www.mosis.com/ or https://europractice-
| ic.com/ depending on which side of the Atlantic you are. They
| are intended to make small batch/prototype fabrication
| processes available to industry and academia.
|
| OTOH, I am not optimistic the demand for such a CPU would be
| sufficient for any size of run that could end up in a low-cost
| part.
| unixhero wrote:
| I have the Apollo Vampire V2, yay! :)
| TomVDB wrote:
| What did you pay for it?
|
| I don't see any prices on their website...
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's about EUR500, IIRC. Unless you are too attached to
| hardware, software emulation is a more cost-effective option.
|
| And it can JIT the 68K code into native instructions as it
| goes, so it'll end much faster than anything implementable on
| a cheap FPGA. A much faster 68K doesn't make much sense for a
| gaming machine, but makes a lot of sense emulating a Unix
| workstation or a 68K Mac.
| vhodges wrote:
| v4 standalone is ~560 euro
|
| http://www.apollo-computer.com/order.htm
| johnklos wrote:
| They want to call it a successor to the m68040 / m68060, but
| they're more interested in adding incompatible instructions than
| they are in finishing emulation.
|
| Not a fan of yet another target for Amiga software - we already
| have 68000, '020+, PowerPC AmigaOS, PowerPC MorphOS, PowerPC
| WarpUp, PowerPC PowerUp... And now they want to add "68080"? No,
| thank you.
| 656565656565 wrote:
| "Hyper-threaded" - this is Intel terminology, probably should
| state SMT?
| [deleted]
| rbanffy wrote:
| Implementing a 68K ISA could already be an IP minefield without
| using Intel trademarks...
| dm319 wrote:
| I was about to reply to this, thinking what a coincidence, I just
| bought a copy of Amiga Format magazine this week. Of course, my
| mind was muddled and I meant Linux Format, but I guess this just
| means they occupy a similar place in my mind.
| brighton36 wrote:
| I don't know why anyone needs this. But I think it's awesome.
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(page generated 2021-08-31 23:01 UTC)