[Freemint-list] Kronos results on Amiga + Vampire V2

[Vincent Rivière]

On 01/03/2017 à 12:35, Philippe noble wrote:
> You got more or less the same horsepower with Aranym and a 40$
> Raspberry Pi3.

You are certainly right.

The fact is that Apollo people are "real hardware" people, they don't 
like emulators, so they rarely use them, or even compare Apollo 
performance with them. Of course benchmarks like Amiga SYSINFO give very 
good results compared to original Amiga hardware. Similar good results 
can bee seen when comparing CT60 to ST or TT.

In the real world, JIT emulators such as WinUAE or ARAnyM running on 
today's computers literally blast real hardware. But this doesn't matter 
for real hardware lovers.

> Beside the FPU which is missing, can we expect more horsepower when
> Apollo core will be completed? Higher frequencies?

The current situation may not be so bad. I'm not sure that Kronos CPU 
benchmarks are really relevant in the real world. They test only a few 
instructions in loops. Real programs may behave differently. For 
example, a lot of work has been put in Apollo 68080 for instruction 
parallelization, branch prediction, etc. I'm not sure that these 
features are properly tested with Kronos.
On the other hand, a real test case would be to run a lengthy program, 
not doing much disk I/O, and see how long it runs on several machines.

There is also much room for performance gain in the FPGA. Gunnar 
regularly improves performance of many instructions.

And about higher frequencies, yes, they can be used. The Appolo Team 
regularly make tests with higher clocks, that's really promising. This 
adds a significant performance increase.

And maybe there are also some other optimization domains we completely 
missed (alignments, etc.) and which could improve performance.

IMHO, there is still much room for performance gains.

At least, this benchmark show you something concrete.

BTW: Chip RAM is very slow on Vampire, while FastRAM is very fast. It 
seems that Kronos mixes the memory results, so the overall memory 
performance looks bad. Look at the details, you will see the difference. 
The tested EmuTOS version (optimized for Vampire) uses FastRAM for 
anything possible.

-- 
Vincent Rivière