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Table of Contents

68080 Core

Overview

68080 is a new CPU that is code-compatible with the Motorola 68k processors.

It is an affordable CPU for your classic Amigas (or Amiga compatibles) that is much faster than the fastest 68060. It is compatible with all CPUs and FPUs of the Motorola 68000 family. 1) It is designed according to modern CPU standards, is fully written in VHDL, and is intended to run on Altera Cyclone FPGAs.

AmigaOS 3.x currently recognizes this new CPU as a 68040.

Advantages

  • Fast, available, affordable, compatible
  • Superscalar, Hyper-threaded
  • Executes up to 4 instructions per clock cycle
  • Two address calculation engines
  • Two integer execution engines
  • Market-leading code density
  • Optimal cache utilization
  • Separate data and instruction caches, supporting concurrent fetch/read/write per clock cycle
  • Automatic memory prefetching
  • Memory stream detection
  • Store buffer
  • Branch prediction

Performance

68080 CPU, when embedded on FPGA chips such as Cyclone III and Cyclone V, is much faster than the fastest 68060. This is possible because of the advanced design of the APOLLO Core, because of large and fast instruction/data caches, and because of the very fast read/write memory access.

Below are some benchmarks done with the MiniBench2) tool for some classic Amiga machines. All tests show that the Core is much faster than a fast A1200 + 68060 @ 66Mhz - scores are all confirmed by SysInfo, SysSpeed and AIBB benchmarking tools.

System Accelerator CPU Frequency Performance MiniBench Points
Amiga 600 ACA620 68020 16 MHz 4 +
FPGA Arcade TG68-based 68020 n/c 9 ++
Amiga 1200 ACA1231 68030 41 MHz 11 +++
Amiga 1200 Blizzard1230 68030 50 MHz 11 +++
Amiga 4000 68040 25 MHz 13 +++
Amiga 4000 68040 40 MHz 25 ++++++
Amiga 1200 MK2 68060 66 MHz 65 ++++++++++++++++
Amiga 600 Vampire 600 V2 SILVER6 x15 173 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

More detailed comparisons to an overclocked 68060 can be found here.

Features

The 68080 CPU covers all the instructions and architectural designs of the classic MC680x0. It also brings some new features that make it faster. The table below shows the architectural improvements for previous 680x0 CPUs and this new one.

Feature 68000 68020 68030 68040 68060 68080
68k ISA X X X X X X
Extended EA-modes X X X X X
BitFields X X X X X
64Bit MUL X X X X
64Bit DIV X X X X
Instruction-Cache 256B 256B 4kB 8kB 16kB
Data-Cache 256B 4kB 8kB 32kB
Fully pipelined X X X
Superscalar X X
Store Buffer X X
Static Branch Prediction X X X
Dynamic Branch Prediction X X
Branch Target Cache X X
Conditional Rewrite X
Linkstack X
Instruction Bonding X
Instruction Fusing X
64-Bit Support X
3-opp instructions X
Memory-Prefetch X
Multimedia Extension X
Selfmodify Support X X
Peak Inst/Cycle 0.25 0.5 0.5 1 2 4

Supported instructions

All integer and floating-point instructions from MC68000 to MC68060 are supported.

Unsupported instructions:

  • TAS2: Never used on AmigaOS.
  • MMU-related: Rarely used on AmigaOS.

AMMX: New 64-bit instructions

These instructions are very similar to the SSE / AltiVec versions of them.

68080 lets you use EA as 1 source and to update 3rd registers - so normally not overwrite source registers.

You are here: start ยป apollo_core

1) Few rare instructions are currently not supported.
2) Other than the latest version, you can also grab the original MiniBench, from before the APOLLO-Team started maintaining it.
Last modified: le 2020/08/02 12:37

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