hyperthreading

[bloodline]

SamuraiCrow wrote:
The Matrox graphics card was a little after the vintage of the A1200 as was the 486DX.  When I bought my A1200 the best PC you could get was a 386DX 33 MHz.

My appologies, sicne I was into Amiga's during that time... I have little memory of what the PC world was doing :-)

But my point still stands, the SVGA and x86 chips were far in advance of the Amiga (due to Commodore not developing the technology) by 1992...

The 68060 is equivalent to the original Pentium and the accelerator card is of a later vintage than the A1200 it was plugged into.  AGA chipset is an accelerated graphics chipset much as the Matrox was except with less 3d acceleration on the AGA chipset.

In fact the AGA chipset inhibited 3D by not offering a Chunky pixel mode.

What kills the performace of the PC is the fact that Windows hogs too much memory and swaps to the hard drive constantly.  AmigaOS doesn't do that.  If you run AROS on the PC you'll see that it can perform as well as an Amiga.  (If you can find 20 applications to run on it.)

Run the GFX demos (I think there are 14 of them) which come with AROS and see them in action! all multitasking away at full speed :-)

[zyphoid]

Hey yep!.....But wouldn't say 1992. Now you made me have to bring up CD32! Or better yet SX-32Pro

[bloodline]

zyphoid wrote:
Hey yep!.....But wouldn't say 1992. Now you made me have to bring up CD32! Or better yet SX-32Pro

The CD32 was just an A1200. The C2P Akiko chip was just a patch over the cracks, and could easily be replaced with a CPU routine which offered similar performance.

SX-32Pro was third party and make much later... and still only allowed the CD32 to keep up with the A1200 third party expansions.

[zyphoid]

yea but graphics at that time was the thing and cd32 offered a console which displayed them brilliantly far beyond anything else. I think it was sega genesis 16bit at hte time.  sx32 add-on made it a bonified home computer the same year, and allowed easy i/o svga serial on one card i guess pci style without installing software and graphic drivers for display true plug and play only amiga made it possible  :-)

[bloodline]

zyphoid wrote:
yea but graphics at that time was the thing and cd32 offered a console which displayed them brilliantly far beyond anything else.

But the time Commodore managed to release the AGA chipset it was already looking very old... being just an upgrade of the ECS chipset (which istelf was just a minor upgrade to the OCS), and not adding any significant new features.

To be seriously good at the time;

It needed to break the 2Meg chips ram barrier.

It needed a seriously improved Blitter, with some primitive drawing support... perhaps some functions to facilitate texture mapping.

It needed some chunky screen modes.

It needed some high/true colour mode (which goes with the feature above).

A 16bit audio mode.

The OS needed to provide a greater degree of abstraction from the chipset.


If these feature had been added, it would have been up there with the best avaiable at the time!

[Zac67]

bloodline wrote:

If these feature had been added, it would have been up there with the best avaiable at the time!

Definitely - and we could still buy Amigas in the computer shop around the corner. Whatever they'd look like today...

[zyphoid]

i concur i always had a problem with the 2meg chip ram limitation.  8bit paula was ok to me.  16 bit audio? didn't that require a sound card for pc's where amiga had custom chip audio built in!
lets damn those two dudes that screwed up the platform approaching 2 decades before we could show any signs of life and recovery.

[bloodline]

It's just occured to me that I basicly described the Atari Falcon... hardware wise, everything the A1200 should ahve been...

[Karlos]

bloodline wrote:
It's just occured to me that I basicly described the Atari Falcon... hardware wise, everything the A1200 should ahve been...

Except for the totally retarded 16-bit databus, you mean :-D

[Starke]

Karlos:

Not to interupt too much here,

very close to 3am now, anyway,

But I dont see your point in trying to make a pc look good while running a windows OS. I find that morally wrong!

Maybe Linux, UNIX, AROS, MorphOS or whatever else will run on it, but not WINDOWS, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Having said that, OK, So your trying to point out, that it can multitask better now then what it did 10 years ago, I think the poster of this POST, is merely pointing out, that HIS Amiga is still doing the same like that current system hes friend had, HENCE, PC with WINDOWS OS IS absolute nonsense!

After all, to be still looking outdated in some retro specs from an A1200, I think it is criminal.

I also find it Criminal on what Amiga Inc Are doing, hurry up already, fuk off Hyperions and Amiga Inc problems, and think about us users for a change, especially if you dont want to loose more of your user base!

Night mate, and Nice posting, I find it relevant to point these things out from time to time, and let people know how bad an OS can make a computer sluggish!

Cheers

Cheers 8-)  8-)  8-)  8-)

[bloodline]

Karlos wrote:

bloodline wrote:
It's just occured to me that I basicly described the Atari Falcon... hardware wise, everything the A1200 should ahve been...

Except for the totally retarded 16-bit databus, you mean :-D

I don't think the Atari engineers really had much choice... But yeah, a nice 32bit bus to feed that 030 would have been nice.

[Karlos]

Starke wrote:

But I dont see your point in trying to make a pc look good while running a windows OS. I find that morally wrong!

Maybe Linux, UNIX, AROS, MorphOS or whatever else will run on it, but not WINDOWS, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I didn't say which OS was running. Simply that an x86 CPU that's older than a P4 could happily outperform a 68060 by orders of magnitude. In no way, whatsoever, is a 68060 based amiga as fast as any "modern" PC. It feels faster to use because of the extremely lightweight, efficient kernel that Mr Sassenrath blessed us with.

However, if you want to demonstrate horsepower, simply try running something that actually taxes the CPU. You will then see anything more recent than say a pentium 60 starting to leave the 68060 behind. A modern x86 leaves it so far behind you'd need something like the hubble space telescope to even see it.

Having said that, OK, So your trying to point out, that it can multitask better now then what it did 10 years ago,

No it can't. There was nothing stopping the 386 running a fast, responsive, multitasking OS either. I've used BSD ports on 486's back in the day that were extremely nimble and felt faster to use than machines today with orders of magnitude more CPU power when all you are doing is simple console based stuff that doesn't use any CPU power anyway.

Unfortunately for the majority of x86 users, every incarnation of Windows seems to find ways of siphoning away all your spare CPU cycles to no good end.

[DonnyEMU]

I am not trying to be crude or start a flame war or anything but I agree that how an OS performs usually has nothing to do with the quality of the processor it's based on. We have learned this most recently thanks to events like AROS and MacOS X on Intel becoming reality.

Another new thing hitting this year is hardware assisted CPU virualization, which is being made famous on Intel based Mac software through software called "Parallels" which allows you to run MacOS X and Windows or Linux simultaneously With no perceived lack of speed. If you aren't aware of Parallels, you should check it out at:

Parallels Website

The point I am making by bringing all of this up is that some of the complaints about people having this open or that not open on an OS version that is long since DEAD has nothing in common with the reality of the current versions of the OSes that you are trying to say it's like today. I sit here on my new 17" laptop, running Windows Vista Ultimate, 2 Gigs of ram (and my cpu clock on my sidebar tells me that even with the SQL server loaded and runningI am only using 12 percent of the CPU, on my Core 2 Duo processor. It has a 160 gig hard drive.

My point it just this, HARDWARE and SOFTWARE has way outgrown the battle of the CPUs etc. We are in a new era of performance. The things people are talking about here just aren't relatable to modern PCs (including Macs).

I am glad OS 4 now has memory protection, I look forward to an AmigaOS with full multiuser functionality and support of CPU virtualization (Don't mean emulation either)..

The stuff Amiga folks are complaining about was the past, not the present and everyone needs to move on and move forward..

Enough of the bully pulpit..

Bring me OS5, x64!!!

[Piru]

I am glad OS 4 now has memory protection

OS4 doesn't have memory protection.

[GW]

SamuraiCrow:

The Matrox graphics card was a little after the vintage of the A1200 as was the 486DX. When I bought my A1200 the best PC you could get was a 386DX 33 MHz.

The 50MHz i486 CPU had been available for more than a year when the Amiga 1200 was released in October -92:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1200
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_microprocessors

But the Matrox Millennium was released several years later. Looks like the first drivers for that card were released in -95:
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/corpo/support/drivers/previous/prv_drv2.cfm

[Zac67]

Yes, that pretty much matches my memory, too.  :idea: