Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46286224

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

From my perspective it lined up exactly with when I was looking to upgrade. I decided to bite the bullet and go with Duplicati, storing to a European based S3 service. I decided against US cloud providers since the US is looking too politically unstable to put anything important there. It was easy to set up and so far is running well.

A Kintel UltraScale+ is quite a prize though, really nice write up.

I do wonder though about designing circuits vs designing schematics. I see you have ‘wire down 100’ making it a more visual language than defining the nets. Be interesting to separate the schematic layout from the nets, so rule base schematic layout can then be applied.

The main issues with Codex now seem to be the very poor stability (it seems to be down almost 50% of the time) and lack of custom containers. Hoping those get solved soon, particularly the stability.

I also wonder where the price will end up, it currently seems unsustainably cheap.

It is great to be able to select individually per site. I often like to use the native French and just drop back to English if its technical language.

I do find that every site has the setting in a different place which is annoying, it would be great to be able to select it in a standard place on the browser.

The worst offenders are the single language per country sites. For example Ebay insists on only using German in Switzerland, which is rather frustrating since I only know English and French so far.

It has a reimplementation of the ECS and AGA chipset. It includes custom extensions to the chipset to 'SAGA' which is an attempt at extending the registers to more modern standards.

It also has a reimplementation of the 680x0 CPU, which is using more modern design techniques. The developer used to work on Power.

Anyway putting it all together its a great system in the vein of the Amiga. Of course it is not as fast as a modern ASIC, being consumer low end FPGA based. Still it is great fun.

Relevant to the Amiga 600? Well there is a standalone version but there is also a version called 'Manticore' that fits into the Amiga 600.

Many people will say you can get similar performance with emulation. This is of course true though, as someone who studied microelectronics, I see the value in real hardware. Both in future potential for making an ASIC and for more precise sub-microsecond level timing.

There is an alternative semi-emulation approach. i.e. emulating the CPU with a raspberry pi and using the rest of the original hardware. This is known as PiStorm and connects the GPIOs from PI onto the 68K to replace the original CPU.

An annoying feature of EFS is how it scales with amount of storage, so when its empty its very slow. We also started hitting its limits so could not scale our compute workers. Both can be solved by paying for the elastic iops but that is VERY expensive.

In the pokeymax and sidmax projects I have dual pokey, dual sid, dual ym2149 and a simple dma sample engine available. It would be great to make some songs using all of them for their strengths at the same time.

i) FPGA on a newer process so it can clock higher. For faster 68k in the Amiga core and pentium 1 equivalent speeds in the x86 core.

ii) Faster ARM chip and better ARM-FPGA fabric, opening up hybrid emulation. Currently the ARM-FPGA layer is a real bottleneck and also the ARM core is a little slow.

iii) More spare IO to allow per-system custom io boards.

iv) Built in IO/memory board so they can fit in a nicely designed case rather than the current eyesore.

I'm more concerned about how well 18a and beyond is coming on. Also how well is the sales side and client support for this going? I was thinking they were working more with TSMC to learn how this works from a client perspective so they can build something similar.

Regarding AI. Technically speaking isn't the AI hardware largely cut and paste? A much simpler CPU of which there are a few thousand copies. With the expertise they have in RTL design it does not seem that difficult.

That said I do not think that parallel compute of this nature is going to be future of AI, it is too expensive in terms of power. I'm sure a much more efficient structure will be designed in the coming years, e.g. neuromorphic.

As part of the bathtub reliability curve its usual for a large fraction of failures early in life, how much over the usual failure curve are we?

It's still unclear what fraction of CPUs are impacted for both issues. Was oxidation a single fab just for a month and only 5% of produced CPUs? Is the microcode issue in TB 3.0 or TVB, so would only impact the 1[34]900s?

It's also unclear if once degraded it can still reliably work at say 95% peak frequency. In the case of a partial recall it might be worth a discount option if that is the case.

Anyway it's mostly speculation beyond Intel's post on their forum (+Reddit responses), it will be interested to see the next stages which will hopefully clarify some of these. This is just a discussion forum I'm sure the final detailed announcement will the made via their main communication channels.