[Oberon] Astrobe for FPGA

[Chris Burrows]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Oberon [mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of
> greim
> Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 9:54 PM
> To: oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch
> Subject: [Oberon] Astrobe for FPGA
> 
> One last question regarding this topic:
> The timing of the full FPGAOberon is strongly influenced by the CRT
> refresh rate. Is there any speed/clock-frequency increase with your
> slim
> system realized/possible?
> 

I use a modified version of the Modula-2 Lilith benchmark program to compare
times on various systems. On the slim system I haven't set out particularly
to make it faster. However, StallX went along with the VGA code which I
suspect has made a difference - on average it is about 10% faster.
Experimenting with increasing the clock-frequency is definitely on my list
of things to do. 

If it could run at 100 MHz the benchmark program indicates that the average
RISC5 performance would be the same order of magnitude as the average
performance of Oberon code on the ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers running at
100 MHz. I have seen MicroBlaze that info leads me to believe that might be
possible. Note, However, that Wirth's FPGA floating point on the RISC5 at 25
MHz is already twice as fast as his software floating point on the Cortex-M3
at 100 MHz so that skews the averages a little!

Regards,
Chris

Chris Burrows
CFB Software
http://www.astrobe.com