Ooh, new toys from Mr. Dunklee. UPDATED ADDED AT BOTTOM OF POST
A parceiro with faster SD card access, and no longer requires any PAL mods to the a1000 daughterboard. You could think of this as a "minor" rev, except the changes were partly done to facilitate the new Parceiro Accelerator, shown here:
A 68SEC000 clocked at 28MHz, software controlled (no dip switches, etc). I'm beta testing for David. Like an AdSpeed for those in the know. The software control is done via a WB1.3 extension menu for Parceiro, very nifty!
SysInfo says I'm at 0.81x of an a2500 but 1.37x of a stock A1200, when clocked at 28MHz. This part surprises me, because I thought the only difference between an A2500/020 and A1200/EC020 was the address-bus width. Not cache or other performance?
Disk throughput goes from ~406KB/sec to ~765KB/sec. All speeds with a grain of salt, since sysinfo isn't a great benchmarking tool.
UPDATED: apparently myself and another fellow (Gord in Canada) have PAL variants on our A1000 daughter-boards that didn't like the new Parceiro + Accelerator combo, and resulted in me getting less than 28MHz reported, and less than stellar results in the perf tests!
Been working with David (like drinking from a firehose!), and he believes there's a few different remedies / solutions. I'll be trying both a new set of PALs, as well as the existing PALs but a new firmware for the Parceiro itself, and should see MUCH higher numbers than I reported earlier.
For example, while I reported 750KB/sec on the SD card, David is getting more than 1MB/sec. And while I reported 1671 Dhrystones, 1.74Mips, 1.37x A1200, and 0.81x A2500/020, he's reliably reporting 2850 Dhrystones, 2.97Mips, 2.34x A1200, and 1.38x A2500/020. Basically, the expected perf is some 70-80% faster than the numbers I originally reported!
Update: 6/23/2023
Received a FW update and managed to flash it using the Lattice tools. The FW update got me much better performance than earlier posted, but still not quite maximum. Then I got a new set of PALs for the daughter-board of my A1000 from David, and finally achieved maximum performance and reliable results.
Dhrystones: 2839
vs. A1200 EC020 14MHz, 2.33
vs. A2500 68020 14MHz, 1.38
0.61x the speed of an A3000, without upgrading to a 68030! And now getting 970KB/sec out of the SD-Card hard drive.
My A1000 feels reborn.