Azryl wrote:
I will wade in here with a few rambles of my own
Guys... go look at the chip die used to manufacture the motorola 68040 and later 68060
now check the manufacturing die for the 386 and 486 chips
All I can see are a lot of very slight engravings on a shiny lump od silicon... nothing different bwteen them really.
Motorola built beautiful chips while the x86 were nothing but horrible cludges with mixed memory models and old instructions left over from previous chips for backward compatability. They look ugly!
intel, with a large installed customer base, decided that backward compatibility was important. Motorola start a fresh with the 68000... the 6800 was never a popular as the 6502... so there was less incentive to remain compatible.
To then say in the same breath that the new x86 chips have more horsepower than any old 68060 chip. Again check the manufacturers die, the design of the x86 chip from pentium onwards reflects an amazing amount of design features/layout and functionality with the motorola 68060 and the modern PPC chips.
You might have to reword this paragrah, I'm having trouble reading it.
Basically, all the newer x86 chips are a risc style core running emulated old microcode instructions thru multiple pipelines wrapped inside caches to maximise speed.
You do realise that's how the 68060 worked, right?
The "RICS style Core" is actually a simplified x86... optimised to execute commonly used instructions and without all the addressing modes common to CISC CPUs.
Microcode is rarely used on a modern x86, except on very complex often unused instructions.
How did windows achieve its multitasking... oh yeah, using a flat memory architecture which was not available before the 386 chip.. but amazingly the 68000 processor line had this from conception. So did the MOS 6502 where as Intel seemed to be off on its own as far as memory design and implimentation was concerned.
intel had backwards compatibility to think about, which seems like that was a design win given the fact almost all computers now use them. I think we can all agree that the 286 was a horrible design... but so what, intel fixed their mistakes with the 386.
The 386 was so good, intel were still manufacturing it upto the early part of this year! Motorola abandoned the 68000 long before that.
If you want to compare apple to oranges, check whats inside. It does make a world of difference.
Thats the chip hardware. Software.... well
Simply... Amiga OS is a micro kernel. It does amazingly well with few resources. But you have to write smarter, better constructed programs. Harder to do, even harder to debug.
AmigaOS isn't a micro kernel for the simple reason there is no distinction between kernel space and user space... AmigaOS is a very strange beast, designed around a number of hardware limitations and with little thought to the future. It's quite brilliant from an academic point of view and thats why I love to study it.
Windows/OS2/Unix/MacOS/Linux's are macro kernels. Control all the resources and parcel out whats needed for the programs. Has memory protection, programs dont have to be as smart or as aware of the OS requirements. Easier to program and debug.
Windows and MacOS X are hybrid kernels, with micro kernel and monolithic kernel features, to get the best of both worlds. OSX is build upon Mach 3.0 which was one of the first microkernels ever and defined pretty much everything we consider a microkernel today.
Unix and Linux are esentialy the same thing and both are Monolithic.
MacOS (Pre OSX) was a nasty kludge.
I know nothing about OS/2.
Basically.. micro kernel is one cop looking after a sandbox full of kids. Keeps moderate control but cant keep on eye on every kid all the time.
Macro kernel is a sandbox with cops lined up all around the edge watching the kids inside. Any kid get out of hand, the cops pounce and eject for bad behaviour.
No, AmigaOS is just a sandbox full of kids... who can do what ever they want regardless of each other.
The Other OS's with memory protection have the police officer, to look after them.
Come on people, dont just sit there sprouting more and more drivel about something from 1992 or so.. dig deeper, check out what came before, what was the normal, what could a person walk into a shop and buy. Then that person take home and actually use!
Yes, I am well aware of what I could buy in 1992.
Check 60's then the 70's then the 80's before you amazingly bore us all with your opinion of what now is better!
You cannot compare two totally different computer systems with kernel philospohy's from decades apart. Its just not fair
It wouldn't be fair if the illinformed poster didn't sit there and try and tell us that an 060 was faster than a Pentium4 when the 060 is running AmigaOS... it's just not true.
The Above has been edited to stay inline with what Karlos said. As he was more accurate.
Every computer will do its job at its maximum efficiency until it physically fails.
Flame me, bore me... geez just get informed before you do either
Az
How about I just inform you?
