TF1260 New Firmware Alpha Released!

News & updates for the upcoming 68060 accelerator

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darukur
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Re: TF1260 New Firmware Alpha Released!

Post by darukur »

terriblefire wrote: Fri Dec 17, 2021 7:57 pm
PaulJ_2.0 wrote: Fri Dec 17, 2021 7:46 pm I'm getting nothing from the new firmware on my Rev 2B.
LED power stays dim.
If I revert to previous beta 2021_09_07_999 it's booting fine.

Strange this motherboard...
Been tested on 3 rev 2s. Infact rev2B was the most stable platform.
I terriblefire and team! thanks for the update to test!

I have a 1D1 Revision A1200 board with the required mods as stated in the docs, with beta 2021_09_07_999 works flawlessly (I was making a comparisson with sysinfo, bustest and quake timedemo) but with latest alpha it just stay on black screen an dim led, no matter 6ns or 10ns firm for the ram cpld.
Any hints to where to test? (I read all the thread btw)
terriblefire
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Re: TF1260 New Firmware Alpha Released!

Post by terriblefire »

darukur wrote: Tue Jan 04, 2022 10:07 pm
terriblefire wrote: Fri Dec 17, 2021 7:57 pm

Been tested on 3 rev 2s. Infact rev2B was the most stable platform.
I terriblefire and team! thanks for the update to test!

I have a 1D1 Revision A1200 board with the required mods as stated in the docs, with beta 2021_09_07_999 works flawlessly (I was making a comparisson with sysinfo, bustest and quake timedemo) but with latest alpha it just stay on black screen an dim led, no matter 6ns or 10ns firm for the ram cpld.
Any hints to where to test? (I read all the thread btw)
Only thing you can do is try DiagROM. Also are you PAL or NTSC 1D1. Do you have the 1D1 clock patch?

EDIT: 1D1 NTSC was the main development machine. Who built your card there may be soldering issues that wouldnt have affected older firmware.
———
"It is not necessarily a supply voltage at no load, but the amount of current it can provide when touched that
indicates how much hurting you shall receive."
darukur
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Re: TF1260 New Firmware Alpha Released!

Post by darukur »

I was able to validate the latest alpha is more unstable in my system (1D1) with 68060 Rev5, I changed the PSU to one of an A500 and fail less than with the slimmer one from A1200.
I ran several tests with the three firmwares and even though the latest alpha brings more cpu clock options, it fails in 62.5 Mhz and runs on 66.667, whereas the performance is similar with the beta.

Captura.PNG
Captura.PNG (106.1 KiB) Viewed 3113 times

Thanks for sharing the firmware updates!
terriblefire
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Re: TF1260 New Firmware Alpha Released!

Post by terriblefire »

darukur wrote: Tue Jan 04, 2022 11:14 pm I was able to validate the latest alpha is more unstable in my system (1D1) with 68060 Rev5, I changed the PSU to one of an A500 and fail less than with the slimmer one from A1200.
I ran several tests with the three firmwares and even though the latest alpha brings more cpu clock options, it fails in 62.5 Mhz and runs on 66.667, whereas the performance is similar with the beta.


Captura.PNG


Thanks for sharing the firmware updates!
All this is known. If you read the readme we are not seeing rev5s able to overclock with the new firmware.

Its nothing to do with your motherboard. If your rev5 works at 50mhz then thats all you're going to get. Maybe 60 max.

Please dont nag me about motherboard issues when your CPU is working fine at 50Mhz. When someone says they have issues with their motherboard i assume they mean it wont boot period.

EDIT: Also your performance tests are not really useful. Fastmem speed hasnt changed much.
———
"It is not necessarily a supply voltage at no load, but the amount of current it can provide when touched that
indicates how much hurting you shall receive."
CrazyC
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Re: TF1260 New Firmware Alpha Released!

Post by CrazyC »

Just for reference, the TF1260 has worked well with my 1A motherboard. (that version is not listed in your FAQ).

I am noticing that it now seems to often take two attempts to start my machine (I am using sfx power supply in a checkmate case so it is not underpowered) but that has been reported elsewhere.
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Chain-Q
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Re: TF1260 New Firmware Alpha Released!

Post by Chain-Q »

I finally updated my card to the Dec 17 alpha FW release. It works fine so far, the card seems to run fine at all advertised-as-functional speeds. It's stable up to 95Mhz with a Rev.6 CPU. (Stable means, I could watch demos, for about an hour, and they were fine.) I got frequent crashes at 100Mhz, but with a CPU sample size of 1, that's hardly conclusive.

I posted some pictures on Twatter, here and here

I did the update using a Raspberry Pi 3, and wrote a "tutorial" on how i did it, it's here (in English).

Great stuff, thanks Stephen, and everyone involved!
gsoravil
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Re: TF1260 New Firmware Alpha Released!

Post by gsoravil »

Thank you TerribleFire for previous input. The stuff you stated to me on the clock phases has helped me get my bearings. Mostly it got me to try speed+phase combinations I originally thought were ridiculous but aren't.

I am a bit surprised that for me (rev6) the card is most unstable in the middle frequencies despite trying different phases. I am stable at 50 ... and then 84, 94, 100. 67-80 destabilize or lock up my machine regardless of phase used. 94MHz, phase 0 seems to be the most stable for me.

Hopefully that is useful feedback in some way.

Benchmark wise, my DMA reads from my FastATA V are in the ballpark of my Blizzard PPC 060 on alpha, which was most definitely not the case on original firmware. However, screen redraws and boot speed are slow on alpha compared to original firmware. I'm curious what's fundamentally different about the mainboard access methods and if there is symmetry between chip read and write speeds.

Note I am specifically not using MMU to cache ROMs yet so that I can see the true access speeds for now.

Mainboard is 1D4 NTSC w/TF's suggested mods.

Overall I am happy enough with alpha as-is to consider having a second card for my GF's machine and (dreaming here) finding another Rev 6 for it.

Greg
terriblefire
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Re: TF1260 New Firmware Alpha Released!

Post by terriblefire »

gsoravil wrote: Thu Jan 13, 2022 1:14 pm I am a bit surprised that for me (rev6) the card is most unstable in the middle frequencies despite trying different phases. I am stable at 50 ... and then 84, 94, 100. 67-80 destabilize or lock up my machine regardless of phase used. 94MHz, phase 0 seems to be the most stable for me.
This is all known. Its to do with setup times not phases. We accepted this was probably alright to release like this as people with CPUs that could do 75Mhz will go to 94 without issue.
Benchmark wise, my DMA reads from my FastATA V are in the ballpark of my Blizzard PPC 060 on alpha, which was most definitely not the case on original firmware. However, screen redraws and boot speed are slow on alpha compared to original firmware. I'm curious what's fundamentally different about the mainboard access methods and if there is symmetry between chip read and write speeds.


Chipram access is measurably faster than the previous firmware. Hugely. By almost a factor of 2. Reads are slightly slower than writes. 7Mb/s writes is the limit for AGA chipset. This is what we get. Its not really possible to go any faster.

Use bustest (https://aminet.net/package/util/moni/bustest) with chip/fast parameters and you will see.
Note I am specifically not using MMU to cache ROMs yet so that I can see the true access speeds for now.

Mainboard is 1D4 NTSC w/TF's suggested mods.

Overall I am happy enough with alpha as-is to consider having a second card for my GF's machine and (dreaming here) finding another Rev 6 for it.

Big factor in chip access speed is colour depth and video mode. 8bpp will make your chip speed crawl as its contended. make sure you keep this the same in your tests.
———
"It is not necessarily a supply voltage at no load, but the amount of current it can provide when touched that
indicates how much hurting you shall receive."
gsoravil
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Re: TF1260 New Firmware Alpha Released!

Post by gsoravil »

terriblefire wrote: Thu Jan 13, 2022 1:21 pm
Benchmark wise, my DMA reads from my FastATA V are in the ballpark of my Blizzard PPC 060 on alpha, which was most definitely not the case on original firmware. However, screen redraws and boot speed are slow on alpha compared to original firmware. I'm curious what's fundamentally different about the mainboard access methods and if there is symmetry between chip read and write speeds.


Chipram access is measurably faster than the previous firmware. Hugely. By almost a factor of 2. Reads are slightly slower than writes. 7Mb/s writes is the limit for AGA chipset. This is what we get. Its not really possible to go any faster.

Use bustest (https://aminet.net/package/util/moni/bustest) with chip/fast parameters and you will see.
I downloaded bustest and put it through its paces. First let me say that in all cases booting with no startup-script didn't significantly change the benchmarks of bustest. Here's where I'm at:

Bustest (OFW = Original FirmWare):
ACA1233@40MHz (68030): chip readm = 6.4 writem 7.0 <= AFAIK this is a bit of an apples vs oranges
Blizzard PPC/060 @ 50MHz: chip readm 3.5 writem 7.1
TF1260 OFW @ 50MHz: chip readm 3.5 writem 3.5 <= This firmware draws as fast as the other cards
TF1260 Alpha @ 50MHz: chip readm 4.4 writem 6.9 <= This firmware draws slow and boots slow (see below)

So the tests confirm what you're stating yet my actual performance is as such:
ACA1233 boot time: 27s
PPC/060 boot time: 47s (note this does a patch and reset before it even starts to boot)
TF1260 OFW boot time: 30s
TF1260 Alpha boot time: 57s <= Slower than I realized

A moderately long directory listing in a shell window takes about 50% longer on alpha than OFW.

I am lost as to what the root cause of this is. I can say that I distinctly remember beta having the same issue as alpha, though I did not re-flash it for this round of tests.

I can say that overall alpha does what I need much better than OFW despite this UI sluggishness in that things like playing audio on my megamix is FAR more stable on alpha.

And yes, I'm not changing anything - not screen modes, bpp, etc., etc. I definitely don't want to add variables.

I did take a video of my boot time on OFW + alpha flashing via Xilinx tool + boot on Alpha that clearly shows I'm not making things up or changing parameters somehow.

My view right now is this is merely additional data-points in getting feedback to the project, but if I can be of help as a testing edge-case or if you have any inkling of something else it could be please let me know.

Again, I appreciate all your feedback and the massive amount of work you have done.

Greg

P.S. If anyone else out there with deep Amiga hardware or software knowledge has any inkling of what could possibly cause such weird behavior, please let me know. Logic would dictate that the faster bustest speeds would dictate better, not worse, boot time. Note, I do also get faster disk benchmarks in sysinfo on alpha vs OFW. So bizarre...
terriblefire
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Re: TF1260 New Firmware Alpha Released!

Post by terriblefire »

I cant comment on boot times. If you've added the ehide.device during your startup it might time out for 30 seconds waiting for a drive on one firmware vs the other.

In order to compare boot times fairly use this completely clean HD image.

https://wordpress.hertell.nu/files/WB31Clean.zip
———
"It is not necessarily a supply voltage at no load, but the amount of current it can provide when touched that
indicates how much hurting you shall receive."
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