PiStorm Emu68

As I wrote before the PiStorm is already very nice, stable but not that fast, I heard with the Emu68 it should be much faster (not so much features though, not network, AHI direct access and so on).

I used this manual. Also attached a cooler to the raspi to not let it overheat anymore and it works nicely barely it stays under 70° degree even on whole day use.

You can feel that it is much faster… SysInfo tells you that it is much faster, but to be honest, I never trusted SysInfo so lets get out my old test codes. Sadly the links to the benchmark game are gone, seems the page does not exist anymore, but I still have the sources so still can plan around with 🙂

Especially the tests: fannkuch 10 and BinaryTree 15. (68060/50Mhz= A1200 with Blizzard 1260, MorphOS = MacMini 1.4Ghz, UAE/AROS/Linux = Athlon FX 8120 3.16 Ghz)

4-5 times of a 68060/50, not bad, it also emulates a FPU (68040) so also FPU tests are possible, for example the scimark test:

Amiga1200 68060/50 FPU code
Mininum running time = 2.00 seconds
Composite Score MFlops:     2.26
FFT             Mflops:     1.18    (N=1024)
SOR             Mflops:     5.05    (100 x 100)
MonteCarlo:     Mflops:     0.86
Sparse matmult  Mflops:     1.81    (N=1000, nz=5000)
LU              Mflops:     2.41    (M=100, N=100)

now for the PiStorm A600 Emu 68 it looks like this
Mininum running time = 2.00 seconds
Composite Score MFlops:    20.35
FFT             Mflops:    13.12    (N=1024)
SOR             Mflops:    41.80    (100 x 100)
MonteCarlo:     Mflops:     6.61
Sparse matmult  Mflops:    18.16    (N=1000, nz=5000)
LU              Mflops:    22.07    (M=100, N=100)

so here we have around 10 times faster than the good old 68060/50.

Here again it feels much faster because the RTG output is so smooth and the harddisk access is so much faster feels more like UAE speed wise. MUIMapparium for example is really nicely usable scrolls very smooth.

Also the Emu68 boots much faster than the other method and shows a nice boot picture, so you do not see the raspi booting just needs a bit longer than a usual Amiga boot (like you disconnected the Floppy).

And the most important… it seems to be stable same as the other method, some hours of Delitracker playing no crash, rebooting much more reliable than the other method… works always, I think I will stay with this Emu68 for now.