Path: news.uh.edu!barrett From: mercury@ins.infonet.net (John Gager) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: WarpEngine 4040 accelerator for A3000T/A4000 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Date: 15 Jun 1994 20:03:07 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 367 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2tnmpr$37e@masala.cc.uh.edu> Reply-To: mercury@ins.infonet.net (John Gager) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: hardware, accelerator, 68040, A3000T, A4000, commercial Originator: barrett@karazm.math.uh.edu PRODUCT NAME WarpEngine 4040 [MODERATOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on June 18 and June 21, 1994. Search for the text "[UPDATE:" to find updated information. -Dan] BRIEF DESCRIPTION A 40 MHz 68040 accelerator for the Amiga 4000 and 3000T (3000 soon). Includes memory expansion capabilities (up to 128MB) and a SCSI-II FAST hard drive controller. Other models include the WarpEngine 4033 and WarpEngine 4028 which are 33 and 28 MHz versions of the same board, respectively. COMPANY INFORMATION Name: MacroSystem Development Address: 24282 Lynwood, Suite 201 Novi, Michigan 48374 USA Telephone: (810) 347-3332 FAX: (810) 347-6643 Email: macrosystem@cryogenic.com Support BBS: CryoCafe BBS (503) 257-4823 Accessible on Telnet to address 199.2.115.2 Port 42 Mailing list: There is also a mailing list available for WarpEngine support. To subscribe to the list, send mail to majordomo@icecube.cryogenic.com with "subscribe warped" in the BODY of the message. LIST PRICE WarpEngine 4028: $ 899.95 (US) WarpEngine 4033: $1599.95 (US) WarpEngine 4040: $1899.95 (US) I paid $1469 (US) for the WarpEngine 4040 via mail order. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Amiga 3000T, 4000, or 4000T. (Note: When revision 2 of the board becomes available, it will work also with the Amiga 3000.) [UPDATE: I received a report from Barry Kryshka (chapm004@maroon.tc.umn.edu), saying that the WarpEngine 4040 is "incompatible with Quantum 210 and 425 megabyte hard drives." The symptoms are "random read/write errors" and the "drive popping up one day, and not showing at all the next time." Barry says that a Macrosystems technical support person has confirmed that there is an incompatibility. The incompatibility is not mentioned in the manual. - Dan] SOFTWARE None. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 4000, 16MB Fast RAM (installed on the WarpEngine), 2MB Chip RAM 120 MB Internal Seagate IDE Drive 1.3 GB Toshiba MK-538 Hard Drive (external SCSI-II) NEC 3xi CDROM Drive (external SCSI-II) Tandberg 3600 Tape Drive (external SCSI) SyQuest-270 Removable Cartridge (external SCSI) NEC 3D MultiSync monitor Kickstart 39.109 (3.0), Workbench 40.35 (3.1) (I obtained Workbench 3.1 as a registered developer.) INSTALLATION [MODERATOR'S NOTE: If you are not comfortable opening up your Amiga, then you should have the work done by an authorized Amiga service center. Opening your Amiga yourself may void your warranty, and careless work may even damage the machine. - Dan] Installation is not terribly difficult, but it is not for the novice. To get maximum performance, you need to remove the Fast RAM SIMMs from the 4000's motherboard and install them on the WarpEngine. This requires a good knowledge of anti-static techniques, or else you may destroy the RAM. Next, you have to set a few jumpers on the WarpEngine to specify the type and size of SIMMs you are using, whether or not you need to add a wait state for slower memory, and the SCSI configuration. These jumpers are well documented in the manual. Finally, you have to remove the A3640 or 68030 processor board from the 4000 and install the WarpEngine in its place. The WarpEngine is mounted to the motherboard using snap-in plastic standoffs, so it's just a matter of aligning the board and connector, then snapping it in place. If you get nervous just taking the cover off your 4000, then I would suggest you have the board installed by a qualified technician. The WarpEngine comes with SCSI hard drive partitioning software, SCSI device drivers, and a utility to remap the Kickstart ROM into the WarpEngine's local bus memory. REVIEW The main word for this board that portrays my feelings is: WOW!! If you want to breathe new life into your 4000, then this board is for you. What makes the WarpEngine so special? MEMORY First, the 4000 has always been crippled by its memory design, especially with CBM's A3640 processor board. Not only was you limited in the amount of Fast RAM could be installed (16MB), but its memory access speed is actually slower than that of the A3000 and 1200! Almost half the speed, to be exact. But with your SIMMs installed on the WarpEngine, you will never be embarrassed again. As you can see from the MemTest benchmark below, the WarpEngine's access to Fast memory is four times faster than a normal 4000's, and I'm using 1 wait state because of my 70ns SIMMs! What does this mean for you? The speed of a computer is more than raw processing speed. An efficient memory design can make a big difference in applications such as image processing, 3D rendering, and others in which data in memory needs to be moved quickly. Although the WarpEngine's 40 MHz processor provides a raw 1.6 times increase in speed, you may find your 4000 up to 3 times faster with certain applications! The WarpEngine also provides the capability of adding up to 128 MB RAM using standard 32MB 72-pin SIMMs. Not only that, but the SIMMs can be mixed with different sizes. In other words, if you had 3 4MB SIMMs, you could add a 32MB SIMM for a total of 44MB. So if you need to scan 24-bit, 300 DPI pictures directly into memory, the capability is there. All you have to provide is the checking account large enough to pay for the memory. :-) 40 MHz 68040 Next is the 40 MHz 68040 processor. Even if you previously had the A3640 card in your 4000, you will notice a very nice speed increase in the overall operation of your Amiga. Windows snap up quickly, your applications run smoothly and quickly, and your 4000 feels like a different computer. For those of you with a 68EC030 CPU in your 4000, then the WarpEngine will be a very pleasant surprise! Not only will your Amiga be considerably faster, but also you will finally have an MMU for niceties like virtual memory (GigaMem). SCSI-II FAST Controller No more lousy IDE!!! The WarpEngine provides a SCSI-I/SCSI-II FAST DMA controller using the NCR-53C710 controller chip. The controller is a true DMA controller and transfers data directly into the WarpEngine's fast local memory and the Amiga's address space. What this means is that not only do you have a very fast controller, but also the load on the 68040 processor is minimal. And unlike CBM's or DKB's 4091 controller, the WarpEngine does not require the revision -11 SuperBuster chip. It will work just fine with your current buster or motherboard. Unfortunately, I do not have a very fast SCSI-II hard drive to put this controller really to the test. However, people who have used the WarpEngine with a screaming drive like the Seagate Barracuda report a transfer rate of over 8MB/sec! John Chang of Scala reports their animation player that pulls frames directly from the Barracuda can play 768x480, 64-color animations at over 20 frames per second. Considering the time it takes to process and display a frame, this is quite impressive. The WarpEngine also provides various options for the SCSI controller using jumpers. For instance, you can set the delay to allow slower drives to power up before being scanned, enable Synchronous and FAST Synchronous transfers, and disable the ROM autoboot. Since I was using the A4091 before the WarpEngine, I was wondering what I might have to go through to get my current SCSI drives to work. I was pleasantly surprised to find that after I installed my WarpEngine and turned on the computer, the SCSI drive booted up as if nothing had changed at all! So a big thanks goes to MacroSystem Development for conforming to CBM's standards! BENCHMARKS Here are the AIBB 6.5 results for the WarpEngine. The AIBB results have been edited for brevity, and only the comparisons to a standard 4000 are shown. Both were set for 68020 code and 68040 math. The base system was the normal 4000. These tests were done with the WarpEngine set for 1 wait state since I only had 70 ns SIMMs, and it crashes quite a bit if I try to run it with 0 wait states. But with 0 wait states, the MemTest has a rating of 4.6 with a transfer speed of over 19 MBytes/second. WarpEngine A4000/040-25 MHz EmuTest 1.88 1.00 Writepixel 1.47 1.00 Sieve 2.77 1.00 Dhrystone 1.60 1.00 Sort 1.76 1.00 EllipseTest 1.12 1.00 Matrix 2.22 1.00 IMath 1.61 1.00 Memtest 4.02 (WOW!) 1.00 TGTest 1.14 1.00 LineTest 1.02 1.00 Savage 1.61 1.00 FMath 1.62 1.00 FMatrix 2.72 1.00 BeachBall 1.64 1.00 InstTest 2.41 1.00 Flops 1.61 1.00 TranTest 2.22 1.00 FTrace 1.62 1.00 CplxTest 1.61 1.00 Note: You may notice that the EllipseTest, TGTest, and LineTest are not much faster than a normal 4000. That is because these tests depend more on the speed of the blitter and Chip RAM than on the WarpEngine. Here are the DiskSpeed 4.2 speed ratings for a Seagate Barracuda drive downloaded from the CryoCafe BBS. I have no reason to believe that these figures have been tampered with in any way because other users of the Warp Engine and Barracuda have reported transfer rates of over 8MB/sec. MKSoft DiskSpeed 4.2 Copyright ) 1989-92 MKSoft Development ------------------------------------------------------------ CPU: 68040 AmigaOS Version: 39.106 Normal Video DMA Device: sdh2: Buffers: 50 CPU Speed Rating: 4976 Testing directory manipulation speed. File Create: 79 files/sec | CPU Available: 70% File Open: 241 files/sec | CPU Available: 28% Directory Scan: 490 files/sec | CPU Available: 45% File Delete: 358 files/sec | CPU Available: 27% Seek/Read: 2130 seeks/sec | CPU Available: 7% Testing with a 512 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer. Create file: 60208 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 85% Write to file: 60329 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 86% Read from file: 260447 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 52% (4096 & 32768 Buffer readings skipped for brevity) Testing with a 262144 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer. Create file: 1971736 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 89% Write to file: 3899392 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 95% Read from file: 8323072 bytes/sec | CPU Available: 91% Average CPU Available: 69% | CPU Availability index: 3433 DOCUMENTATION The documentation for the WarpEngine is a small, spiral-bound book. It has a very nice overview of the accelerator and its special features over a normal 4000's. Although I didn't read everything in the manual during installation, I went back to read the complete installation procedure for this review. Based on what I read, I think that a person who has installed Amiga boards, hard drives, or other internal expansions to the 4000 shouldn't have too much trouble installing the WarpEngine. The installation procedure is clear and step-by-step. LIKES I think you know how much I like the WarpEngine. It's a very fine accelerator that also corrects the shortcomings in the original 4000 design such as the memory access and lack of a SCSI controller. One very nice thing about the board is that if you purchase the 28 MHz model, you can easily upgrade it to the full 40 MHz version just by changing the processor and plug-in oscillator. So when 68040-40 chip prices start to drop, you can turn that WarpEngine 4028 into a real screamer. [UPDATE: As of June 21, 1994, the WarpEngine is not user-upgradable to a faster processor. However, MacroSystems will perform the upgrade for you. Contact them for details. In the future, the WarpEngine may be user-upgradable. - Dan] DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS Not much to dislike, but there are always a couple of problems. I've always felt that the fan in the 4000's power supply was not very robust. Adding the WarpEngine confirmed my suspicions. Although the accelerator came with a small fan for the CPU, those SIMMs generate a lot of heat. After the WarpEngine was installed, my 4000 started crashing at random intervals, but only after my computer was on over 1/2 hour or so. A clear sign of overheating. To try and find out what was overheating, I ran Microbotic's memory testing program MBRTest-2, and it didn't take very long for it to locate the problem. To help with the inadequate airflow in the 4000, I installed a small fan directly over the SIMMs. Nothing was mentioned in the manual about possible heat problems or solutions, so I think it should be mentioned here and included in their troubleshooting chart. Another thing is that if you are a developer, or have been in the past, there is a good chance you were using the A3640's MapRom feature to boot 3.1 Kickstart. No such capability exists for the WarpEngine, and every other Kickstart boot utility I tried failed to work. So for right now I'm stuck with the old 39.106 ROM Kickstart. Bet you feel sorry for me, eh? But Bill Coldwell of Cryogenic Software is working on a software Maprom feature and will provide it to certified developers. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS The only other product that I'm aware of that is in competition with the WarpEngine is GVP's G-Force 40. Since I've never seen the G-Force, I really can't make many comparisons. But a couple of things I do know about the G-Force 40 made me choose the WarpEngine instead. The G-Force 40 DOES NOT include a SCSI controller, it is an option. And GVP has always made their board designs so you had to purchase their memory, at their prices. I wanted the option of being able to purchase 16MB SIMMs at the best prices I could get. BUGS None noted, but I haven't used the software that came on the disk very much. The ROM SCSI device driver, warpdrive.device, seems to be bug-free and works very well with my current drives. VENDOR SUPPORT I did call MacroSystem Development to find out whether or not the WarpEngine had a Maprom feature, and they were courteous and informative. Although they weren't able to provide a solution, at least they answered the phone. Bill Coldwell also provides limited support on the CryoCafe BBS. Be nice to him: he doesn't get paid to support the product. WARRANTY The WarpEngines have a two year warranty covering manufacturing defects. CONCLUSIONS All in all, I've very happy with my purchase of the WarpEngine. It has made my 4000 the computer it should have been from the beginning, but CBM was more interested in saving a buck. So I give the Warp Engine "two thumbs up" and a rating of 5 stars out of 5. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1994 by John Gager. All rights reserved. This review is freely distributable. CONTACT If you have any comments, flames (be nice!), or need further information, you can contact me via Email on several systems: Internet: Mercury@ins.infonet.net CompuServe: 71336,624 Genie: J.GAGER --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews