WinUAE speed changes!

[SHADES]

Hi all,

Just playing around with WinUAE and I have found that it runs 80% faster on my work HP Pentium 4 2.0Gig CELERON computer with onboard Intel crap graphics Windows XP and 512 MB RAM than it does on my ATHLON 2400+ computer with ATI 8500/128 graphics card and also 512MB RAM Windows 2000.

How did I get 80%?? Well I ran AIBB tests on the PC at work as the PC at home seemed less responsive than the one at work. Things like beach ball tests etc. The work one gave 112% bigger than the one at home!!

JIT and all other stuff in enabled, infact I use the same config at home as to the one at work so I don't get it.


What's the go here! my Athlon computer is certainly the faster computer and the graphics hardware would be twice if not more the power of the crappy Intel chipset one.

Is it the fact I am running windows 2000 on the Athlon? I wouldn't have thought so, or is it because some bright spark compiled WinUAE for Pentium 4 specificly?

I'd sure like to run the program faster than at work, but not at the cost of buying a Pentium 4 or having to buy a CRAP Intel graphics card. :pissed:

[minator]

I notice one has WinXP whereas the other has Win2K, perhaps it's using OS functions which have changed between the 2.

Have you tried it with XP on your home machine?

[SHADES]

@minator

No, I run Windows 2k at home. I woudn't have thought it would be such a difference though, afterall, Windows XP is built on Windows 2000 and I have all the patches installed.
However if Windows XP has THAT much of a perfomance gain on Windows 2000, I'll buy it!!!

[cecilia]

i think it's the pentium. i run my WinUAE on a P4 laptop (win2000). it runs just fine.

[jj]

where as a pentium4 will kick nearly any cpu's arse at video encoding, due to long pipelines and no need for prediciton

An AMD 64 whoops its arse on games.

depending on the speeds,a pentium 4 will probably eb quicker than your athlon 2400+

run a benchmarking prog

or dp what i did last year, buy a xp2500+ with barton core, whap the fsb up to 400mhz and there u go super fast 2.2ghz amd with 400 mhz fsb on the cheap

[blobrana]

Hum,
Onboard chip cache an operating system makes a huge difference...

And i suppose that the memory speed (FSB) would be also significant...er, as well as HD speed, and graphics card...

(Did i miss anything out?)

[SHADES]

@ Blobrana

I thought P4 CELERON had a lot less CPU Cache than normal P4s??

Remember I did say p4 CELERON.
Surely my ATHLON 2400+ has more cache than the Celeron CPU.

:edit:
Sorry that may have sounded a bit harsh, I should have worded that differently and I do appreciate your effort helping. I'm at a loss to why one is so much faster than the other, well other than the creator compiled WinUAE only for P4 or something like that.

[Ilwrath]

Surely my ATHLON 2400+ has more cache than the Celeron CPU.

Yes, though by how much depends which 2400+ you have.  
The AMD Semperon 2400+ features 1.667ghz, 256k L2, 128k L1 and 333mhz FSB.  
The AMD Mobile Athlon XP 2400+ features 1.8ghz, 512k L2, 128k L1 and 266mhz FSB.
The AMD Athlon XP 462 2400+ features 2.0ghz, 256k L2, 128k L1  and 266mhz FSB.

The Celeron 2.0ghz has 128k L2, 20k L1 and 400mhz FSB.

My guess might be that the Athlon is getting killed at the memory accessing.  The emulation may not fit in the on-board cache of either processor, and the Celeron's faster front-side bus, improved memory bandwidth, and raw clock speed are giving it the edge.

You might want to benchmark in Windows, though.  If the Celeron shows significantly faster for CPU scores, you may have a configuration error on your Athlon that is slowing it down.  (Bad/outdated chipset drivers, perhaps?)

[Trev]

I believe the JIT compiler is designed to produce code optimized for Pentium processors.

Your display adapter shouldn't make much of a difference one way or the other.

Trev

[SHADES]

@ illwrath

I don't know!, to me I would have thought the bigger on die Cache is going to have the greatest perfomance increase over FSB memory access speed in this case as it's where all the common instructions will execute from. the more cache, the mor instructions able to be accessed without the need to re-calculate.

All drivers are up to date for my mainboard including bios.

In all the examples above, no matter what Athlon chip is there, it still has a much bigger on die CPU cache like you said.

[SHADES]

@ Trev

Well that's a real Plus for Intel. Gee I hope you are wrong, I don't like INTEL CPU's

That's nasty coding. Why not just optimize the JIT for standard x86 that is used by all x86 CPUs??

[Damion]

 Hey SHADES,

SHADES wrote:
Hi all,

Just playing around with WinUAE and I have found that it runs 80% faster on my work HP Pentium 4 2.0Gig CELERON computer with onboard Intel crap graphics Windows XP and 512 MB RAM than it does on my ATHLON 2400+ computer with ATI 8500/128 graphics card and also 512MB RAM Windows 2000.

I would check your setup at home, because "all things being equal" your Athlon should be doing better. WinUAE smokes on my Athlon (Barton), 3.9 boots literally in 2.5 seconds, and benches roughly equivalent to a 1 GHz 68040 in processor benchmarks. I can't wait to try it on an Athlon 64.

Is your Athlon a mobile? What are the multiplier/FSB set to, and what is your RAM rated for? (Granted, your overall system config will have an effect..)

Is it the fact I am running windows 2000 on the Athlon? I wouldn't have thought so, or is it because some bright spark compiled WinUAE for Pentium 4 specificly?

I'd sure like to run the program faster than at work, but not at the cost of buying a Pentium 4 or having to buy a CRAP Intel graphics card. :pissed:

FWIW, WinUAE is *much* faster on XP than 98, haven't tried 2000. Don't bother with the graphics card, WinUAE 2D (especially RTG) is still slower than it could be, and I found absolutely no difference testing between a Radeon 9000 and Radeon 9800 XT on the same system. (Overall, 2D ops benched somewhat faster on my G3 Pegasos/Radeon 9000.) With a Radeon 8500, you'll get a much better performance boost by upgrading things other than your gfx card.

Also...I would highly suggest checking your chipset drivers, video drivers, and maybe giving XP a go...make sure you have a level testbed for comparison!! :-)

[Glaucus]

I find that a virus checker can dramatically influence the speed of WinUAE. When I had Trend's OfficeScan running in the background, WinUAE was running at a snail's pace. With it turned off it was super fast. Perhaps your home PC has a different virus checker?

  - Mike

[Trev]

@SHADES

Well, it's not a conspiracy against AMD. And it's not necessarily the instructions themselves but how the processors work internally and how they handle certain types of operations.

One has to make a choice, and Intel still has the most market share. I suppose the JIT could have been designed without optimizations, but then it would just be slow on every processor, not just AMD's.

Of course, I could be talking out my ass. ;-) I don't really know anything about dynamic recompilation. But anyone with enough motivation should be able to pick up the WinUAE source code and figure out why it's slower on processor B than it is on processor A. :-) From the looks of it, the optimizations in the JIT are about replacing expensive function calls with inline code and making simple choices about which instructions to generate (e.g. a single atomic register swap instruction versus a series of three moves using the stack, a temporary register, or a combination of the two).

It may actually be a case of the Intel processor having extended functionality that the AMD processor just doesn't have.

EDIT: Glaucus has a good point. As the JIT is generating code, the virus scanner is most likely scanning and rescanning those regions of memory. The end result is a serious hit not only from the scanning itself, but from context switches and general operating system overhead (by overhead, I mean all the things the operating system does to make multitasking possible). Contrary to what most people believe, it *is* possible to tune the Windows NT kernel. If you can't find your bottleneck in hardware, it may be something the kernel is doing that it shouldn't be doing or vice versa. I highly recommend Windows Internals Fourth Edition by Russinovich and Solomon.

Trev

[Damion]

Those are definately good points...but personally I don't think this has anything to do with the processor,, I seriously doubt WinUAE uses SSE2, in fact a 1.8 GHz Barton "should" (setup properly) stomp a 2.0 GHz Celeron at WinUAE math/proc benchmarks.  

And it certainly could be a background task conflicting with things...myself I don't run "ANY" virus checker in the background, just update and scan with AntiVir about once a week or after I've been surfing prOn...YMMV

--edit--

Please excuse the small wrapping in some of my posts (can't seem to fix it for some reason)...my monitor tanked a few weeks back, and I'm presently stuck using a 12 year old 14" at 640x480...:-(