exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

....opens trenchcoat....




nearly 3 decades of 68k kleptomania right there.

The one on the lower right might have a slight aura of iffyness but I think I tried it already in the AB40.

I had hoped the Vampire guys would produce a plug in 68040/060 replacement.

dml wrote: 28 Jun 2025 16:46 ....opens trenchcoat....

Now that need to add a drooling emotie :lol:

peters wrote: 28 Jun 2025 16:48 I had hoped the Vampire guys would produce a plug in 68040/060 replacement.

Maybe. But I wouldn't use their stuff after all the abuse I got from their direction anyway. I'd rather stick to real silicon and max it all out.

dml wrote: 28 Jun 2025 16:46 The one on the lower right might has a slight aura of iffyness but I think I tried it already in the AB40.

Maybe. The date code is Week 30, 2004, not long after Motorola became Freescale so maybe they had not changed the logo yet.

alexh wrote: 28 Jun 2025 17:32 Maybe. The date code is Week 30, 2004, not long after Motorola became Freescale so maybe they had not changed the logo yet.

Hmmm. Thanks for the extra background info!

Screemo from AmiBay is selling a few 68060's, he has multiple post for different revisions there.
I bought stuff from him in multiple occasions and it was always good stuff..

exxos wrote: 28 Jun 2025 16:37 Ultimately it's why I want to redo the ST chipset to just use a faster bus. We should be able to hit 32mhz without much issues. But that's full 32mhz bus with 32mhz writes. STram won't be a bottleneck anymore. Then later move to the 030 for full 32bit... No need for accelerators and multiple other hacks then ;)

+1 to that.

Especially if (as alluded to above) the higher clocked 040s are starting to go up in price. :roll: Not sure the 25Mhz ones are worth the effort of upgrading over a 50Mhz 030 really. IIRC werent they roughly double the speed per clk cycle?

Another cool option would be insanely high clock rate MC68000s. That would be cool. (I know you can do it @exxos ) :D

I wonder if watercooling and overvolting would get >75Mhz? :lol:

peters wrote: 28 Jun 2025 16:48 I had hoped the Vampire guys would produce a plug in 68040/060 replacement.

They are starting to produce ST HW flashed hybrid firmwares for the Amiga Vampire cards now, so not sure there would be any effort to focus on making a standalone CPU type of product for the Ataris now anyway and there doesnt seem to be much demand from Mac or Sun owners either..

mrbombermillzy wrote: 28 Jun 2025 23:20
Especially if (as alluded to above) the higher clocked 040s are starting to go up in price. :roll: Not sure the 25Mhz ones are worth the effort of upgrading over a 50Mhz 030 really. IIRC werent they roughly double the speed per clk cycle?

IIRC it performs about 3x the speed at the same clock. It depends on the operations - the simplest ops (like move/add) are about 2x as fast but other common operations can be 4x or more. It is pipelined and overlaps instructions so the cycle count for most instructions is not constant and can 'shrink' depending on what happens before/after.

There are a lot of other factors though which both make it faster (cache, copyback/batching, optimised FPU) and in some cases could make it slower (poor performance on a 16bit databus, memory interface always limited by CPU external clockspeed etc.)

Also compatibility is not 100% for 040 so it's still a trade that might not always be worth it.

I'll need to fire up my Afterburner and get some measurements to compare. It's a 32/40MHz system but a decent ratio can be figured out from that :)

@dml That sounds about right. :)

I do vaguely remember the MOVE16 instruction being handy.

dml wrote: 29 Jun 2025 01:02 I'll need to fire up my Afterburner and get some measurements to compare. It's a 32/40MHz system but a decent ratio can be figured out from that :)

That would be interesting. The 040 doesnt really get much attention nowadays.