I am now pleased to announce that on the 8th June the prototype of the
Mayhem Accelerator was finally completed.
With work on the accelerator starting in January 2004, then first unveiled
as a work in progress with an initial (and dodgy!) 12MHz speed at the ORSAM
show in November 2004. There's been plenty of hiccups along the way,
including the latest just a couple of weeks ago when I somehow killed the
prototype, so for quickness I built up another one from scratch and carried
on where I had left off as I really wanted to get the hardware finished!
What does the Mayhem Accelerator offer? Speed! It's what the Sam Coupé has
been crying out for and the Mayhem Accelerator speeds up the Sam to 10MHz,
16MHz and 20MHz speeds, with uncontended memory reading for a further boost.
The final design also offers a 6MHz 'legacy' speed as well, to run at stock
speed without having to unplug the interface.
Using 'BogoMIPS' (by Frode Tennebo) and 'Fractal Explorer' (by Dr Andy
Wright and Simon N. Goodwin) as two test programs to give some benchmarks of
the final design here are the results:
Fractal Explorer (generating the default Mandlebrot image)
Normal Sam: 21.30 seconds
Mayhem @ 10MHz: 10.56 seconds (202% speedup)
Mayhem @ 16MHz: 7.20 seconds (296% speedup)
Mayhem @ 20MHz: 6.06 seconds (352% speedup)
BogoMIPS
Normal Sam: 0.360 BogoMIPS
Mayhem @ 10MHz: 0.748 BogoMIPS (208% speedup)
Mayhem @ 16MHz: 1.208 BogoMIPS (336% speedup)
Mayhem @ 20MHz: 1.513 BogoMIPS (420% speedup)
The final stage now is to complete the designs for the PCB for the
production version and build one up to go through testing, then the
Accelerator will be ready. All going well it will be available in 8 weeks
time at the start of August.
More information will be in the forthcoming issue of Sam Revival covering
the last month of development as well as the pricing of the Mayhem
Acclerator and preordering information. (SR issue 15 - out later this
month, see www.samcoupe.com to preorder this issue or to subscribe to the
magazine)
For previous news and updates please see:
ORSAM 2004 Show report - Sam Revival issue 11
Creating Mayhem article - Sam Revival issue 12
Quazar News - Sam Revival issue 14
www.samcoupe.com website - for news and videos of the
Mayhem Accelerator in action.
All the best,
Colin
=====
Quazar : Hardware, Software, Spares and Repairs for the Sam Coupe
April 1995-2006 - Celebrating 11 Years of developing for the Sam Coupe
Website: http://www.samcoupe.com/
