Title:

Sam440ep_setup

Description:

A little utility to optimize performance on your Sam440ep board (mini-itx and flex versions)

What it does:

* on some Sam440ep boards, the MMUCR register is not set correctly at bootstrap.
This leads to poor write L1 cache performances.
The utility check the register, and if needed, modify it.

* on all Sam440ep boards with a Radeon card enables read prefetching for graphic ram.
If a Radeon card is detected, the utility will modify the POM2 PCI registers to enable read prefetching.
This speed up reads for the gfx card from 15 MB/s to 30 MB/s on a M9 card.

* set the Latency Timer on the 440ep PCI Bridge,
With this new setting read speed increase around 50% on Radeon PCI cards (up to 42 MB/s on a M9 card) and around 200% on RadeonHD PCI cards

* use a more aggressive instruction cache speculative prefetching setting.
This allows a faster execution for some software, for example the following
Blender speed test increased performance by 10%-20%:
bldyn -b projects/bricks_and_water_plugin.blend -o ram:pool -F JPEG -f 0
As a sidenote some values returned by Ragemem are incorrect (MIPS) or lower
(L2 cache read64/write64) when this setting is enabled.
To disable this setting, add NOCCR argument to the command line.

How to use:

* add the utility to WBStartup with Prefs/WBStartup, or put it in S:user-startup if you need to specify arguments

* if run from the shell, it accept the following arguments:
VERBOSE to show some informations
SNDGFX to enable prefetching on the secondary gfx card (in case there is one)
FORCEPOM to modify POM2 registers even if they are already set (for example to switch prefetching from the primary to the secondary gfx card)

Notes:

* This utility may be obsolete with a future AOS4.1 update and/or U-Boot.

History:

06-Feb-2012 - Version 1.3
now use a more aggressive instruction cache speculative prefetching setting.
added NOCCR argument.

11-Feb-2011 - Version 1.2
added SNDGFX and FORCEPOM arguments.
now set the Latency Timer on the 440ep PCI Bridge.

01-Dec-2010 - Version 1.1
there was a bug in the detection of the MMUCR setup, fixed.
more information displayed in VERBOSE mode.

28-Nov-2010 - Version 1.0
first release.

License: freeware
Requires: AmigaOS4.1 and Sam440ep (mini-itx or flex-atx)
Download: sam440ep_setup.lha

For further information, please contact us: massimiliano.tretene@gmail.com