Just for random kicks, why not just emulate the 68060 and all necessary adaptions inside the FPGA? Even better, emulate both the 68040 and the 68060 in the FPGA and find a way to route all 68040 operations to the 68040? While your at, find a way to use them as some kind of dual-core setup that's masked to the mac os as one 68060.
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Motorola 68060 upgrade
- Thread starter LC_575
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You might be correct to say that it's nothing like software emulation, but emulation is emulation. It's not simulation.
FPGA implemented CPU cores are not very fast even on larger and more expensive FPGAs. The Natami project, for example, uses a real m68060 because the softcores are not as fast as a real m68060.
The m68060, you must remember, is no slouch. I'm often reminded because I see my m68060 systems (60 and 66 MHz) outrunning 133 MHz SH3, 100 MHz MIPS, 100 MHz SPARC, and 72 MHz VAX systems is most things as well as 200 and 233 MHz StrongARM systems in certain things.
If you really want m68k MacOS on an m68060, your best bet is an Amiga with an '060 accelerator or something like the Natami running AmigaOS with ShapeShifter to run MacOS. One of the good things about running under AmigaOS is that you get certain improvements such as a real multitasking OS which can do things when MacOS would typically busy-wait (such as when disk activity is going on).
FPGA implemented CPU cores are not very fast even on larger and more expensive FPGAs. The Natami project, for example, uses a real m68060 because the softcores are not as fast as a real m68060.
The m68060, you must remember, is no slouch. I'm often reminded because I see my m68060 systems (60 and 66 MHz) outrunning 133 MHz SH3, 100 MHz MIPS, 100 MHz SPARC, and 72 MHz VAX systems is most things as well as 200 and 233 MHz StrongARM systems in certain things.
If you really want m68k MacOS on an m68060, your best bet is an Amiga with an '060 accelerator or something like the Natami running AmigaOS with ShapeShifter to run MacOS. One of the good things about running under AmigaOS is that you get certain improvements such as a real multitasking OS which can do things when MacOS would typically busy-wait (such as when disk activity is going on).
Since you brought it up and since I've been considering buying a very modern Miggy, how does the Natami compare to, say, one of the SAM Flex PPC boards? It would be nice to run AmigaOS 4, but if the Natami is significantly faster ...
The Natami won't run AmigaOS 4 any time soon because the main processor is an m68k, not PowerPC. Also, I don't think Natamis are for sale yet.
But if you're Ok with running AmigaOS 3.x and not 4, then my guess is that the Natami would run circles around other systems which emulate the Amiga chipset because they've reimplemented AGA and the original chipset, but in a highly modernized way (128 megs of ChipRAM, anyone?)
Personally I think the amount of hardware which AmigaOS supports is too small. I prefer what the MorphOS people did - porting the OS to run on PowerMac hardware opened up possibilities for many more people. I have a PowerPC Mac mini which is wonderfully fast, tiny, and works well with modern peripherals, and if I had the option to run AmigaOS on it, I'd definitely do it.
But if you're Ok with running AmigaOS 3.x and not 4, then my guess is that the Natami would run circles around other systems which emulate the Amiga chipset because they've reimplemented AGA and the original chipset, but in a highly modernized way (128 megs of ChipRAM, anyone?)
Personally I think the amount of hardware which AmigaOS supports is too small. I prefer what the MorphOS people did - porting the OS to run on PowerMac hardware opened up possibilities for many more people. I have a PowerPC Mac mini which is wonderfully fast, tiny, and works well with modern peripherals, and if I had the option to run AmigaOS on it, I'd definitely do it.
I'm happy MorphOS runs on minis, but good grief, it needs to run on {i,Power}Books more (and the hardware is so similar between minis and iBooken that I can't believe they're not doing this or at least not planning to). There are plenty of POWER desktop form factors but very few laptops.
I know I would be limited to AmigaOS 3.x on a 68K, and I would be fine with that if the Natami were significantly better/higher performance. Still, 4.0 is pretty practical as an OS. I played with a SAM Flex at the last Commodore fair I went to and found I could do most of my daily tasks including net access (Origyn, Timberwolf, etc.). If I didn't have such a huge Mac investment I'd probably switch to Amiga, and if MorphOS gets certified for iBooks then I will be putting it on my spare for sure.
Btw, got my POWER6 server coming soon! I wanted a POWER7, but this will still do nicely. (2-way 4.2GHz)
I know I would be limited to AmigaOS 3.x on a 68K, and I would be fine with that if the Natami were significantly better/higher performance. Still, 4.0 is pretty practical as an OS. I played with a SAM Flex at the last Commodore fair I went to and found I could do most of my daily tasks including net access (Origyn, Timberwolf, etc.). If I didn't have such a huge Mac investment I'd probably switch to Amiga, and if MorphOS gets certified for iBooks then I will be putting it on my spare for sure.
Btw, got my POWER6 server coming soon! I wanted a POWER7, but this will still do nicely. (2-way 4.2GHz)
No, it's AIX. I like AIX, actually. I'm that kind of jackbooted thug sysadmin that the old rec.humor.funny posting warned about. 
ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!! :lol:
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/know.your.sysadmin.html
I'm mostly under thug, with a dash of fascist. }
I totally should see if I can get SheepShaver to compile ...
I'm mostly under thug, with a dash of fascist. }
I totally should see if I can get SheepShaver to compile ...
Can't believe you've never seen that before, it's been around for decades now. 
Of course, I do use flat files and grep for phone numbers.
Of course, I do use flat files and grep for phone numbers.
Is it a personal machine or a work machine? I would like to get one for use at home, but they are too rich for my tastes.
I have a POWER 7 machine at work. Holy Crap it is fast.
Back to the topic.
Is the 68060 microcoded? If it is you could reprogram the microcode to work around the problem instructions.
It's a personal box mostly. My long-suffering Apple Network Server is finally exceeding my tolerance for flakiness, and I need another small-iron server. I still got almost 13 years out of it, though, and I expect to get the same or more from this 520. The ANS isn't being disposed of, just demoted to a playbox. They're a real collector's piece anyway, and it's certainly served me well.
Nope. The m68060 is not microcoded.
Just curious - what kind of flakiness have you been seeing? I'm still using a PowerMac 9600 (which is only slightly younger than the ANS), and while it is currently 100% stable (uptime of a year before moving datacenters while staying pretty busy), I'd like to keep my eye out for any warning signs.
I suppose you were running AIX on your ANS?
Just FYI, even if the 68060 were microcoded *very few* microcomputer CPUs allow the microcode to be modified by the user. ("Writable Control Stores" were fairly common in old CISC mainframes and some Minicomputers, however.) Nearly all eight and sixteen-bit CPUs are fully microcoded, but to change anything in almost every possible instance you'd be looking at having to modify a mask ROM on the CPU die itself.
And yeah, I know Intel CPUs since the Pentium Pro can be loaded with runtime microcode patches, which is a fairly unique ability, but even in that case I don't think you could use that facility to, say, force a Pentium 4 CPU to recognize some hardware-specific instruction unique to the Pentium III series. Only Intel knows for sure (Intel's updates are encrypted and highly obfuscated to prevent them from being exploited or even accidentally loaded on the wrong CPU.), but the little research I've done seems to indicate that the Intel microcode table is essentially a breakpoint *after* the instruction decoder which allows a sequence of RISC-like "micro-ops" to be substituted for an existing operation sequence. (Usually the replacement string bypasses some hardware acceleration feature found to be buggy, thus trading off some performance for reliability.) Whether you could actually trap an "illegal" instruction and make it valid with a Microcode update *alone* on an an Intel CPU is something only they know, but it would probably be a non-trivial exercise.
In a purely theoretical sense I've wondered if it would be possible to modify a Transmeta VLIW CPU to run Motorola 68k code. In principle a Crusoe or Efficeon with appropriate code-morphing software could probably easily outperform *any* real 68k CPU, even the fastest Coldfires. Of course, Transmeta never released the tools or documentation you'd need to write your own code-morphing microcode so... that's that. We'll never know whether a 68k-morphing Efficeon would be able to outperform a conventional Intel or AMD CPU running a "normal" 68k emulator or not.
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