Subj : Re: TheA1200
To   : Nightfox
From : tenser
Date : Fri Dec 05 2025 12:44:33

On 04 Dec 2025 at 03:16p, Nightfox pondered and said...
 
 Ni>  Go> All use emulation now, in software or hardware (FPGA). Even now we em
 Ni>  Go> faster CPU's on real Amiga hardware, like the 68060 or 68080 CPU core

Responding to the above (not by Nightfox), the 68060 was a
real CPU manufactured by Motorola.  It wasn't used in many
places, unfortunately: the Pentium had taken over for
consumer-grade desktop machines, and the workstations vendors
had all moved to RISC CPUs by then.

 Ni> Yeah, though I was thinking that a FPGA hardware solution would be more
 Ni> interesting.  And is FPGA actually considered emulation?  I thought I
 Ni> had read somewhere that some people don't consider that emulation, as
 Ni> FPGA basically re-creates the original capabilities in hardware; also, I
 Ni> think that should theoretically be 100% compatible and run just as well
 Ni> as the original hardware, whereas software emulation can be a bit tricky
 Ni> and not always be 100% compatible with all software for that platform.

FPGAs are programmable logic.  You compile a program written
in a language like VHDL, (System) Verilog, or BlueSpec classic
into a bitstream that you can them load into the FPGA, and the
bitstream defines what the logic part does.  Today's bigger
FPGAs contain a lot of stuff like DRAM, PHYs for various
protocols (PCIe, I2C/I3C, eSPI, USB, CAM, UARTs, ethernet MACs,
whatever).  But if used to implement a CPU core, we call such
a beast a "soft core", since it's defined by software: the source
VHDL/Verilog/BlueSpec/Chisel/Whatever program.

In that spirit, FPGAs running soft cores exhibit many of the
same quirky properties of software emulations of these older
CPUs.

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