As you might know we are evaluating the usage of the Coldfire as powerful but also inexpensive option for a very low price NATAMI verison.
 
I've work some time with Freescales Coldfire 54455 development and here are my impressions of it.

Excellent quality of the dev-system
The case is high quality.
The first glance on the board and layout give the same impression. Very quality work. No cheap parts.

Setting up the system was easy
Setting up the system with cross-compiler was easy and simple.
The system comes with good documentation and cross-compiler for MS-Windows on CD.
I've choosen to download the compiler for Linux.

GCC for Coldfire is working good but has room for improvement
Compiling for Coldfire was easy.
But I did look at the ASM that the GCC was producing, and it was obvious that GCC is a bit challenged to create efficient code for Coldfire.
Some may say this is no news.
C is a high language - you can not expect that the code created by GCC will be small or fast.
This might be true.
It was obvious that the created code was both bigger and slower than needed.

The 54455 Coldfire CPU
The 54455 is a V4e Coldfire in a 16 Bit casing, designe dfor very low cost systems.
The V4 Coldfire is a very efficient CPU.
The V4 is much more efficient than all previous Coldfire CPUs.
Under best conditions it can execute up to 2 integer instructions plus 1 branch per clock.

The 54455 is the smallest of the V4e cores.
Its the "embedded" version of the fast embedded CPUs and has only a 16bit data bus.
Because of this the memory performance is a bit limited of course.
All other V4 cores have a 32bit memory interface and if we want to use a Coldfire for a device that needs to have memory performance than all other V4 will have better memory performance.

Cheers

But for comparison here some facts:

Memory-Benchmark
One of the things I like to start with is evaluating the memory performance as it has such a big impact on the overall performance of many tasks.
The 54455 is of course not a memory wonder (with 16bit)
And I just started with benchmarking so here are some early results:

CF 54455 (16bit bus)
Read: 126 MB/sec
Write: 196 MB/sec
Copy: 121 MB/sec

For comparison G3-600 MHz (64Bit Bus) under MorphOS
Read: 228 MB/sec
Write: 87 MB/sec
Copy: 116 MB/sec

As you can see the 16bit Coldfire V4 perfroma quite OK when  compared to a Pegasus I.

Its worth to mind that the all other Coldfire V4 CPUs are 32bit and their memory bandwidth is accordingly higher.

Cheers

The result of the Pegasos are typical for the Pegasos 1.
The read and write performance depends on the combination of CPU, the memory protocla of the CPU, the used Northbridge or the used memory.

For having 16bit bus the mini Coldfire performs quite nicely.
I was not able to benchmark the 32bit Coldfire yet but I assume that the performance of the 32bit V4 Coldfire is double of the 16bit one.

I think the 32bit Coldfire should archive around.
read 32          250 MB/s
write 32        500 MB/s

For comparison here are benchmark results of some PowerPC Neo-AMIGAs.

Pegasos 1 G3 @ 600MHz 64bit-DDR memorybus 200
read 32          210 MB/s
write 32        88 MB/s

Pegasos 2 G4 @ 1000MHz 64bit-DDR memorybus 266
read 32          243 MB/s
write 32        496 MB/s

AMIGA-ONE G3 @ 800 MB 64bit-DDR memorybus 266
read 32          200 MB/s
write 32        122 MB/s

AMIGA-ONE G4 @ 933 MHz 64bit-DDR memorybus 266
read 32          205 MB
write 32        268 MB

As you can see different design have different performance.
The AMIGA-ONEe and the Pegaos 1 both use the same Northbridge.
Its often said that the memory interface of the AMIGA-ONE and PEGASOS 1 is somewhat of a limitation of the system.
 

Fabian Nunez wrote:

That's great, the performance of PPC with the familiarity of the 68K family.  Too bad there's no 68K equivalent to Altivec, that would have really rocked.

The Coldfire have the EMAC unit.
EMAC is said to be highly effective for mass multiplication routines needed for various audio and video codecs.

Fabian Nunez wrote:

What's the price difference between comparable V4 and V5 chips?

The goal is to have a V5 with integrated SuperAGA in one chip.
I would assume that this AMIGA in a chip will come to around $20 total.

Cheers
Gunnar