Windows Vista: Microsoft's Terminator

[Hyperspeed]

What about Transmeta? Wasn't it their main objective to produce an energy efficient CPU for portable devices?

I seem to remember when Gateway were talking about the MMC box that the Transmeta `Crusoe' CPU was extremely powerful and could process different machine code. I've seen this CPU on Sony Vaio laptops (I think with the widescreens) so why Apple are going for Pentiums is beyond me. The Transmeta CPU was supposed to sense when power wasn't being used and almost completely switched itself off, surviving on a little trickle of power for hours worth of mobile work.

Where's SUN, DEC, Toshiba, NEC, Motorolla, Hitachi, Panasonic?

Apple are just flying the stars & stripes and are going to isolate their own diehards...

As for Windows XP, what exactly can it do with 200MB+ that AmigaOS3.9 can't do with 32MB or less?

[Waccoon]

@bloodline:  Sweet.  :-)

PowerPC *is* a good architecture, but not as good as fanatics want us to believe.  They also do NOT run cool when pressed into serious desktop usage.  I still remember the 200Mhz G3 used in the PowerMac Tower at work.  It had a heatsink larger than a stock P4 with a 120mm case fan blowing down on it -- and it still got frickin' hot.

Still, I'm not falling for Apple's new "units of performance" catch phrase.  More fake-world benchmark B.S. -- just like Sony's "twice the performance of XBox 360" claims.

I wonder what will happen to Windows PPC, now.  :-)

Legerdemain:   Actually I installed Windows XP on my old 350MHz Compaq Presario back in the days... optimized it a bit, ran it with only 192MB of RAM and not only did I have a startup at only 7 seconds...

NT is infinitely better than 9x.  My brother-in-law was afraid how much slower his laptop would run after I offered to upgrade it from 98 to Win2K.  Turns out, it works several times faster, now.  I'm impressed, given how much his old Dell laptop sucks to begin with.  :-D

What about Transmeta? Wasn't it their main objective to produce an energy efficient CPU for portable devices?

Yes, but they are slow.  There's a reason it's recongnized only as an "also-ran."

Transmeta probably wasn't anticipating Intel getting their act together and starting to make their processors more efficient (thanks to AMD and the rise of portable devices).  Given Intel's manufacturing capacity, it looks like Transmeta is in serious trouble, now.

I wonder how fast a Crusoe would be running "native" code, rather than trying to emulate x86.

Intel does also have the very efficient i960, but it's not x86 compatible and I've only heard of it being used in arcade games, specifically, Sega Model 2.

Where's SUN, DEC, Toshiba, NEC, Motorolla, Hitachi, Panasonic?

No chipsets for their CPUs.  Those guys make workhorses for CGI renderers, heavy machinery, and network routers.  I'm actually quite surprised how quickly the whole gaming industry dumped non-PPC chips, given how console developers always custom-engineer their own chipsets (usually on the CPU die).

As for Windows XP, what exactly can it do with 200MB+ that AmigaOS3.9 can't do with 32MB or less?

Most memory used by an OS today is for caching to speed up the system, and in this respect, XP blows away OS3.9.  Contrary to popular belief, Windows can be run in low-memory situations quite well.

It's also worth noting that if the OS doesn't suck up all the memory available, it is simply wasting memory.  My system idles at 200MB usage, but if I start loading up lots of apps, memory usage doesn't really increase that much.  Unless I'm running games, of course.  Painkiller tries to allocate more than 900 MB of memory, even though my system has 512.

Games are really stupid when it comes to memory.  They just tell the OS, "GIMME ALL YOU GOT", and the OS has to decide if the game really needs it, or whether it's just being greedy.  That's why when you quit a game, it takes a minute of hard-drive swapping to return to the desktop.  It's not Windows that's using all that memory, it's the game being a memory-hogging b*stard. :pissed:

[Hyperspeed]

If Windows XP is good in low memory situations and the mark of a good OS is one that fills up all the memory it can eat...  why then does Windows XP require 128MB just to boot and still uses virtual memory?

The mark of a good OS to me is one that does what you tell it, when you tell it. Surely even with memory protection a Windows machine is susceptible to memory leaks/fragmentation? Surely virtual memory reduces the lifespan of the magnetic medium?

I'm not arguing that Wordworth 7 can compete effectively with the latest Microsoft Word, but if things are become more compact, more portable, then surely such a resource hungry piece of software should become dinosaur? After all, it's the lean bipedals that inherited the Earth, not the gigantic diplodocus that ate tonnes of leaves and had a brain the size of a walnut!

As for slow Transmeta Crusoe, I saw a 1GHz model and Sony obviously approved of it for it to be in the flagship Vaio laptops! And wasn't it well reported that the Dual-G5 Macs were outperforming even the highest rated Pentium machines? Apple ran an advert proclaiming the PowerPC G5 Mac to be the most powerful computer in the world! Isn't RISC producing much less heat than a comparable speed CISC chip?

:-)

[DonnyEMU]

Considering all the "eye candy" I have been creating with visual studio beta 2, XAML, and the WinFX beta "RC1" lately (it's too bad I can't enter one of the Euro-Demo contests with it).. XAML is pretty cool and coding is very very fast (even for 3d)...

I have developed in C/C++ on the Amiga up to 3.x environments and really I can't see anything currently that is there that really matches the graphics performance and ease of coding..

I think Vista will have very rich uniform user interface which might even be nicer than the Macs.. I just can't understand the continual "Amiga does better" discussion when it's really not in the same ballpark for programmers etc.

I love the Amiga for what it is, even the AmigaOne, but you guys really need to seriously look at what's changing here and evaluate this on a different scale. The world's changing again..

And FYI if I programmed mostly for the Amiga I'd never make a living.. I tried believe me..

[Hyperspeed]

I'm not trying to say AmigaOS is better, Windows has had time to catch up now. What I am saying is AmigaOS is more efficient.

It's like German vs Italian, Mercedes Smartcar vs Ferrari.

One is fast and pretty, the other is small, stumpy and generally resource efficient!

And you should be programming for AmigaOS 4 young man! To the dunce's corner with you!

[DonnyEMU]

AmigaOS really isn't *THAT* efficient (if I was writing for the biggest audience of installed machines out there), memory management (keeping track of memory), semaphores and interprocess communication, things like object linking and embedding (OLE) isn't there. I am forced to look after things that the system should be handling for itself. I hear they finally have better memory management in OS/4 but how many installed machines is that really??

The Amiga forces me to write in a very memory conservative way that doesn't always let me add features to software. I hate things like Bptrs and stuff like that.. It does yet still have some "rock star" features but honestly if OS 4 ran on the old CPU then there would be so much more opportunity for the installed base to have "improved" application performance.

If you consider how much stress it is to port a product like FireFox or Open Office to the Amiga platform, I think my point is made very elloquently.. I am not anti-Amiga I love it, I wanna see more "classic" machine expansion, because with that hardware it's still possible with cpu's such as coldfire..

By the way, I will be laughing all the way to the bank ;-)

[Hyperspeed]

For criticising the Amiga's memory management on it's 20th birthday you're going to laugh all the way to the dungeon!

GUARDS!

:-D

[bloodline]

Hyperspeed wrote:

As for slow Transmeta Crusoe, I saw a 1GHz model and Sony obviously approved of it for it to be in the flagship Vaio laptops!

IIRC the crusoe was only used in Sony's ultraportables... Anyway, the crusoe was never really about performance, it was about power consumption. It could never really compete with even the slowest x86 mobile chips from AMD or Intel in terms of performance. Now ARM have won the power consumption race.

And wasn't it well reported that the Dual-G5 Macs were outperforming even the highest rated Pentium machines?

Steve Jobs reality distortion field taking effect there... Perfromace per $ of the Dual-G5 Mac was much worse than x86 machines*. Though you do get multiprocessing, MacOS X and a beautiful case with it...



*Note: I still want a Dual G5 Mac with Tiger :-D

Apple ran an advert proclaiming the PowerPC G5 Mac to be the most powerful computer in the world!

Apple had to remove the claim in the UK, as after an investigation by the "Avertising Standards Agency", Apple were unable to prove their claim.

Isn't RISC producing much less heat than a comparable speed CISC chip?

Don't fall into that trap, the terms RISC and CISC haven't really meant much since the late 80's.

The PPC is not a RISC chip (look at the MIPS chip if you want to see RISC), the PPC is better described as a Load-Store chip with a neat architecture. But the Modern x86 and the PPC both borrow as many features from both RISC and CISC designs as each other (though not necessary the same features ;-)).

It is true that the x86 ISA does incur penalties, like instruction decoding and lack of architectural registers, which does add to the transistor count when trying to correct (one of the reasons why a basic PPC core can be much smaller than an x86 core). But it turns out that the archtiectural improvements made to the x86 to overcome the limitations, actaully actually improved execution by several factors... notable out of order execution and branch prediction, which is a vital speed boots to current single core CPUs.

[Dan]

Say welome to our new robotic trashcan overlords!


Imagine the destruction if they are loaded with Windows Vista  :lol:

[Ikasu]

With all of the so-called "Enhancements" of XP turned off, I can neatly run XP on a 600Mhz computer. Although it seriously needs all of my 128Mb of ram, it still runs.

Now Vista requires (if I recall correctly) 1.3GHz. Since that particular computer is outdated, I cannot add another CPU. So on top of about $700 to $1000 for the Operating System, I'd need to spend an absolute minimum of $200 for a motherboard-CPU combo (according to anyone who knows me, I'd definately spend more then that, actually.). NOt only that, But I'd need to spend another $400 on the peripherals that were embeded on the first Mainboard. That's already around $1500!

Vista is already cr{bleep}.

@Ikasu

Sorry.  I'd have to disagree with you here.

What you're saying is absolutely no different than what we saw when Commodore went from 1.3 to 2.04 and we had to modify our Amigas to get it to work correctly.

The basic principle -- REGARDLESS of what OS we're talking about -- is, the right hardware for the right software.  Vista  isn't designed to run on 5 year old 600mhz hardware, so don't expect to put it on such hardware and have it run smoothly.  If you do put it on such crap hardware, don't kvetch when it doesn't work.  

Also.  Don't kvetch when you go out and spend the absolute minimum you can to buy crap hardware to install it on either.  It's not the fault of the OS that you're a cheap {bleep}..

I mean really, what you're saying is tantamount to calling AmigaOS and MorphOS crap because you can't install them on your stock Amiga 500.

Wayne

I hate to say this, but I actually like that trashcan case.

Wayne

[adz]

Wayne wrote:
I hate to say this, but I actually like that trashcan case.

Wayne

Scary... :nervous:

[CLS2086]

I have seen lots of people who downloaded Vista (aka : Virus, Instability, Spyware, Trash, Adware), and make it works on old machine but i did not see any "real" benchmark ... My last try with XP Pro (K6-3/500 + 256mb) did not last longer that 2 hours : huge missing frame in video capture (all in wonder AGP), littles short freezes in games, huge time to start a programm, strange TCP/IP unasked traffic, but very smaller boot time time ...  So I quickly switched back to Win2K that take very long to start (3-4 min also for my TB1.4 !!), but works so much well and faster.

Just a question about VISTA, if this "label" was deposed for a previous software, do you think there will be a huge process :lol:  and what about the SUN technologies used for the 3D virtual desktop showed 2 or 3 years ago...

My very personnal stupid record is to install and make works AmigaOS 3.9 on a A1200 (k3.1)with a FPU + 8mb, and also on a A2000(k3.1) + 030+FPU with 4.5 mb  :lol:
Someone told me that he maked it work on an A500+ (k3.1)  with HDD + 4.5mb  :-o

My last try with XP Pro (K6-3/500 + 256mb) did not last longer that 2 hours : huge missing frame in video capture (all in wonder AGP), littles short freezes in games, huge time to start a programm, strange TCP/IP unasked traffic, but very smaller boot time time ...

But that wasn't the fault of Windows at all.  

XP was not designed to run on such outdated hardware, hence my point that it's inappropriate hardware for the software you're trying to run.

I run Windows XP (have for about two years now) on a stable MSI motherboard with Athlon 2800+, a Gigabyte of RAM and a total of 360GB of hard drive space.  I've never experienced any of these type issues.  The machine I run is basically the same one I've run for years, just with constant upgrades  (which I consider about the same as buying an accellerator card).  

Only difference is, I realize that if you want to major things, you need to plan on a reinstall of the OS.  I almost cry when I hear Amiga users {bleep}ing all the time about "I replaced my motherboard/cpu/whatever with something 10x as powerful and completely different hardware-wise, now the crappy OS doesn't work any more..."

For the record, I am planning to move to the X86 Macintosh as soon as it's available, because I don't want particularly like the increased "overseer" factor of Windows Vista.  I run legal software, but I still don't like the fact that they don't trust me enough and keep spying on me.  

It's just too bad that the new Amiga couldn't get their proverbial spit together by going with the cheap (and actually available) x86.

Wayne

[Dan]

Wayne wrote:
I hate to say this, but I actually like that trashcan case.

Wayne

It´s actually a robot running Windows on a mini-itx board.
http://www.mobilerobotics.org/robots/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=223&Itemid=2
Totally idiotic I know, who needs a robot that just stands around waiting....:lol:
Bad design too, with  those wheels it will just get stuck everywhere and it doesn´t have any arms totally useless. The Robosapien is a much cheaper toy and if you want a computercontrolled Robosapien just ducttape an old pda to it or use one of those universal ir-remote extenders.