Amiga AA3000+ Part 7: DSP Breakthrough!

After a huge amount of work by a small group (A10001986, CKTwo, Matze, DarrenHD, Trixster and me) working on A1k.org, we have managed to get the DSP on the AA3000+ motherboard to wake up and do something.
This is still a work in progress with lots of work to be done to really understand what is needed to get the DSP operational but this is a proof of concept.

[@torstenk.351]

Congratulations! Looking forward to finally building my AA3000+

[@PATTHECATMCD]

Was impressed to see a little driver update for this pop up on Aminet a couple days ago.

[@dailyraillive1492]

Amazing.

[@warci]

awesome job guys! Super dramatic stuff,
you guys are making history

[@dailyraillive1492]

Yes love it. Keep up the good work.

[@wrangleramiga896]

Thank you!!

[@Darrenhd2]

Thanks for the video...amazing work! :)

[@Andy-xg8wk]

Great work so far!

[@wrangleramiga896]

Thanks! Just need to make this easy to reproduce

[@timdaeleman]

Wow, so awesome to see this progress. Been following the a1k thread as well. What I don't get. First half of the video I understand it will not work with a dmac 2, bit then you have it run on your system with a dmac 2. I also only have a dmac 2. What are the expectations of it working on a system with a dmac 2?

[@wrangleramiga896]

With DMAC 2 we are missing the ability to respond to interrupts triggered by the DSP. I guess there might be work-arounds in software, or a hardware widget will be needed to add the missing capability. But does it matter? That's the question. I reckon it does because you'd like the 68k to pass off a task to the DSP and then trigger an interrupt when it's done.

[@Darrenhd2]

@@wrangleramiga896 if we have not already we should inform hese. Perhaps he can do another motherboard revision for the interrupt and other fixes needed. He may also be able to help us debug it if he has time.

[@ninline2000]

I actually have a DMAC 4 chip. I got it from a seller on ebay about 20 years ago. I remember I paid way too much for it, I thought at the time. The bidding was pretty hot for it.

[@DragonNova]

So will this work in a similar way to the Atari Falcon if you can get it working properly?

[@wrangleramiga896]

That is the ambition, yes!

[@valenrn8657]

A3000+'s original AT&T DSP3210 selection has support for FP32 and INT24. FP32 can be useful for 3D geometry compute since the current GpGPUs has mostly FP32 compute for geometry.
Atari Falcon's Motorola 56001 only supports INT24 wth about 16.5 MIPS INT24. 68040 @ 25 Mhz can do about 20 MIPS INT32.
AT&T DSP3210 can do about 33 MFLOPS or 40 MIPS.
XC68060/MC68060 @ 66 Mhz has 88 MIPS and 36 MFLOPS. PC's Pentium method would be cranking MC68060 into >100 Mhz clockspeed.
in terms of raw power, AT&T DSP3210 has been surplused by XC68060/MC68060 or AC68080.
Lew Eggebrecht stated once that DSP will be integrated in all future Amiga's AA+ chipsets including the low end ones, but Amiga Hombre has PA-RISC (with MMX like SIMD exxtension) @ 100 Mhz.
AC68080 (with MMX like SIMD exxtension) + SAGA is a good "what IF" when Hombre PA-RISC idea was combined with 68060 and AA+ (SAGA) ideas i.e. Pentium MMX + SVGA PCI counterpart.
The last great and well known DSP was CELL's SPE in PS3 which is largely dispaced by GpGPUs in PS4 and PS5. AMD created 100 GFLOPS raster graphics less GCN/RDNA CU (Compute Unit) for PS5 as a raytracing audio DSP in addition to RDNA v2 36 CU GpGPU.

[@dailyraillive1492]

At t 3110 isn't it? The 4000 has a blank slot.