Amiga 4000
The A4000 is getting most of my attention at the moment. I’m working on a decent setup so that I can compare a nice A4000 against a nice Amithlon system. With a Video Toaster4000, a Video Flyer and an X-Surf 100 installed….I’m out of available slots, so no RTG graphics or sound boards which will put the A4000 at a disadvantage from the start. Thanks to a generous friend I will be adding a WarpEngine4040 soon, which will be receiving an ‘060 upgrade after testing with the stock 68040 CPU. I want to have the A4000/40 68040 @ 25 Mhz, the WarpEngine4040 68040 @ 40 Mhz and the 68060 @ ? Mhz comparisons. To give the A4000 a little more in the graphics, an Indivision AGA MKIIcr was added. This is a pretty impressive little piece of hardware. It pushes down over the LISA chip, pulling the signal from the pins on the LISA chip to run them through a framebuffer to de-interlace and scan-double the stock Amiga video signals and output them over DVI at 60 Hz (or more) to support modern monitors. This means a regular VGA monitor can display your Amiga native “NTSC” or “PAL” modes. You basically attach a monitor (ie NTSC, PAL, Super72, Multiscan, etc..) that is in your DEVS:/Monitors/ with a VGA mode (I’m using 640×480 @ 60 Hz for NTSC, 1024×768 @ 75 Hz for HighGFX for and 1280×1024 @ 75 Hz for Xtreme. These modes “640×480” can be configured to match your actual monitors specs. Really nice device. Currently I am running a 1024×768 32 color Workbench which isn’t that sluggish.
I’m hoping to test a bit more (WarpEngine) before I tear it all down and send it off for a recap and upgrading of the SuperBuster 9 to SuperBuster 11.
Amithlon
As mentioned, I haven’t spent much time on this. I have however come in contact with someone who does know coding/linux and kernels and we have been discussing what can be done to possibly bring some new updates to compiling one for Amithlon. I’ve donated a few graphics cards based on a similar supported GPU (one a PCI NVidia FX5500, the other a PCIe NVidia PCX5750) so he can determine why the PCI bus works and the PCIe bus doesn’t and hopefully correct or patch in PCIe support. Of course this is slow and tedious work so don’t hold your breath…just keep your fingers crossed 🙂
Early comparison….the Amithlon dominates the A4000. Sysinfo V4 gives me basically a “1” in Dhrystones against the A4000 with the A4000. Testing the Amithlon…..upper “290’s” to low “310’s” against an A4000. Not the most accurate testing of course…but speed is one of Amithlons strong points. Video being another strong point (RTG, no native support) as I’m running a very nice and FAST 1680×1050 32 bit color Workbench. Screen redraws are so much faster, even at the higher resolution and higher bit depth. The Amiga does have AGA/ECS/OCS support though and Amithlon is RTG only. More coverage on this when I get the A4000 updated.