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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Amigaz on March 20, 2006, 07:27:47 PM
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Haven't used my A500+ with a 40mhz GVP A530 for some time now but I set her up yesterday and realized how slow this system is compared to my A1200 with a Blizzard 1230 MKIV which is also a '030 and only 10mhz faster
It feels like the GVP '030 40mhz is 50% slower or more :-o
I have the kickstart mapped into fast memory with the GVP utility and the command CPU CACHE BURST in my startup-sequence so the caches are on
Today I installed the ClassicWB ADV package which is based on WB3x (had OS3.9 installed previously) so I thought it was OS3.9 which slowed things down but not.
Have I missed something to squeeze more power out of my '030 or is the side expansion bus of my A500 a big bottleneck?
btw using a 2.1 gig 5400rpm SCSI drive inside the GVP A530
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Have I missed something to squeeze more power out of my '030
Set Workbench to 4 colors.
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AMIGAZ wrote:
is the side expansion bus of my A500 a big bottleneck?
Could be. But my bet is the chipset is much slower.
The 030 in the A500 is doing more nose picking per second than the one in the A1200 does.
It's a common problem with amiga's. Put in a hugely powerfull processor and the chipset that would otherwise help your CPU is then slowing it down.
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redrumloa wrote:
Have I missed something to squeeze more power out of my '030
Set Workbench to 4 colors.
You mean the AGA circuits are faster than the ECS maybe? :-P
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Doppie1200 wrote:
AMIGAZ wrote:
is the side expansion bus of my A500 a big bottleneck?
Could be. But my bet is the chipset is much slower.
The 030 in the A500 is doing more nose picking per second than the one in the A1200 does.
It's a common problem with amiga's. Put in a hugely powerfull processor and the chipset that would otherwise help your CPU is then slowing it down.
That's what i'm starting to suspect
Or it's the ECS graphics that is making everything so damn slow or the expansion bus is 16bit?
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how much ram do you have in the 530? ideally you should have the ram maxed out in the 530 and no fast ram in the 500 itself. a 4color wb should fly even on ecs interlace
having all fast ram in the 530 should speed things up alot.
btw what exactly feels slow, overall response? or wb or some particular program you are trying to run
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KThunder wrote:
how much ram do you have in the 530? ideally you should have the ram maxed out in the 530 and no fast ram in the 500 itself. a 4color wb should fly even on ecs interlace
having all fast ram in the 530 should speed things up alot.
btw what exactly feels slow, overall response? or wb or some particular program you are trying to run
Have 2mb chip ram in the A500+ and max ram in the A530 (8mb)
Everything feels slow, the thing that annoys me trhe most is that opening windows/showing icons is as slow on my stock A1200 (4mb fastram) and running tasks/programs also feel slow..just a little bit faster than on my stock A1200
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Sounds a lot like 16 colors sucking 90% of chipset bandwidth... Try 4 (or maybe 8) colors, that'll help a LOT.
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@AMIGAZ:
Chech if exec.library is in fastmem with Sysinfo - the library list shows in which type of memory each library is allocated. If it is in chipmem, use FastExec (http://www.aminet.net/package.php?package=util/boot/FastExec29.lha) to move it to fastmem.
Burst enabled for the datacache might make things slower on a 030. Burst speeds up sequential accesses and punishes non-sequential accesses and data accesses usually arent extremely sequential. This in combination with the 030s small cache..
So skip the "Cpu CACHE BURST" and just let SetPatch enable the caches as usual. It will enable both instruction and datacache for you, but only enable burst for instruction cache (instruction loading tends to be very sequential).
As others have mentioned, the more colours you use, the less chipram bandwidth will be available when say rendering graphics:
Hires/Hires Lace 2 and 4colours: 3.5MB/Sec write (max)
Hires/Hires Lace 8colours: 2.5MB/Sec write
Hires/Hires Lace 16colours: 1.5MB/Sec write
No read results, but I dont have them in my head and the A2000 is tucked away at the moment.
/Patrik
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Or it's the ECS graphics that is making everything so damn slow or the expansion bus is 16bit?
I was going to say it's the kickstart, but you say it is mapped to fast RAM. When using the A500 3.1 ROM, my A500 runs at half the speed of using the A1200 3.0 ROMs on my Viper card.
I'm going to guess it's the expansion bus then. My A500 with 33Mhz 68020 (16 colour WB) feels pretty fast. The Viper expansion uses the CPU slot instead of the expansion bus.
You could try to speed it up a bit with SystemPatch. I noticed about a 10% improvement in window/icon drawing.
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@mr_a500:
Both the Viper and the A530 are connected to the same bus, just at the opposite ends.
How fast/slow something feels to a person, is very relative.
/Patrik
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@patrik: the impact of using >4 colors has on chip mem speed depends severly on overscan use - if you use extreme overscan (I always did before I had a gfx card, but I did have fast mem), the impact will be a lot higher.
With 16 colors the bus is 100% loaded while the scan line data is fetched and the CPU stalls. The CPU has to wait for the end of the scan line and with max overscan it's only a handful of cycles before the next line starts fetching, AFAIR it's <1/2 of non overscan bandwidth left.
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Both the Viper and the A530 are connected to the same bus, just at the opposite ends.
So, you're saying that expansion through the CPU slot would be the same speed as expansion through the side expansion slot?
How fast/slow something feels to a person, is very relative.
Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. Maybe AMIGAZ can do an AIBB module or something, then we can have real numbers to compare.
When I say "feels fast" I mean opening a window with 30 16 colour folder icons takes less than 3 seconds and opening a program like FinalWriter or Wordworth on a 16 colour screen takes about 2 seconds.
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@Zac67:
Cheers.
@mr_a500:
So, you're saying that expansion through the CPU slot would be the same speed as expansion through the side expansion slot?
Yes.
/Patrik
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mr_a500 wrote:
Both the Viper and the A530 are connected to the same bus, just at the opposite ends.
So, you're saying that expansion through the CPU slot would be the same speed as expansion through the side expansion slot?
They are both basically ZorroII
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patrik wrote:
@AMIGAZ:
Chech if exec.library is in fastmem with Sysinfo - the library list shows in which type of memory each library is allocated. If it is in chipmem, use FastExec (http://www.aminet.net/package.php?package=util/boot/FastExec29.lha) to move it to fastmem.
Burst enabled for the datacache might make things slower on a 030. Burst speeds up sequential accesses and punishes non-sequential accesses and data accesses usually arent extremely sequential. This in combination with the 030s small cache..
So skip the "Cpu CACHE BURST" and just let SetPatch enable the caches as usual. It will enable both instruction and datacache for you, but only enable burst for instruction cache (instruction loading tends to be very sequential).
As others have mentioned, the more colours you use, the less chipram bandwidth will be available when say rendering graphics:
Hires/Hires Lace 2 and 4colours: 3.5MB/Sec write (max)
Hires/Hires Lace 8colours: 2.5MB/Sec write
Hires/Hires Lace 16colours: 1.5MB/Sec write
No read results, but I dont have them in my head and the A2000 is tucked away at the moment.
/Patrik
I turned off the burst cache today and it feels a bit quicker and Sysinfo shows that the exec.library is in fastram
I'm running in highres laced at the moment which could explain the big slowness and also using FFS which is the slowest filesystem in earth :sleep:
Anyway..I'm going to make an AIAB testresult so you guys can see if it's sloow or is it just me. :-)
Maybe the ECS graphics is the big thief here which makes everything so slow.
i'm also positive that the kickstart is loaded into fast ram since I just commented that command line out of my startup sequence which gave me more chipram after that
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@AMIGAZ:
You shouldnt get more chipram when disabling the remapping, but more fastram. If the kickstart is mapped into chipram, it will be even slower than it is originally.
To see if the kickstart really is in fastram, you could use bustest (http://aminet.net/package.php?package=util/moni/bustest.lha) and check that you get more or less the same read-speed for "bustest fast" and "bustest rom".
/Patrik
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AMIGAZ wrote:
I'm running in highres laced at the moment which could explain the big slowness and also using FFS which is the slowest filesystem in earth :sleep:
I don't think the FFS is the bottleneck. The A1200 I have here runs fine with it. It has an 060 inside that is picking it's nose most of the time because of the chipset. Like others said; free up cycles for your CPU by reducing the load on your chipset bus. Or else your CPU has to wait longer before it can use it in case it needs to access something attached to that bus. The A1200 has a wider chipset bus compared to your A500. So the 030 inside the A500 may need more cycles to do the same on that bus. Like a memcpy from fast to chipram.
Anyway I am curious about the testresults.
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patrik wrote:
@AMIGAZ:
You shouldnt get more chipram when disabling the remapping, but more fastram. If the kickstart is mapped into chipram, it will be even slower than it is originally.
To see if the kickstart really is in fastram, you could use bustest (http://aminet.net/package.php?package=util/moni/bustest.lha) and check that you get more or less the same read-speed for "bustest fast" and "bustest rom".
/Patrik
lol, I meant fastram :lol:
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Agreed, appart from the A530 mounted fast RAM, you have a 32-bit CPU connected to a 16-bit system bus. That's your bottle neck right there IMHO.
The stock A1200, with it's 32-bit bus (and about twice the CPU clock speed) is supposed to be about 4 times faster than a stock A500 with it's 16-bit bus. I expect it is similar for an A500+.
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I remember when testing my A500T with Blizzard 2060 and 2 MB Megachip2 the max speeds it could get thru the chipset were between 0.8 MB/s and perhaps 2.1 MB/s and that was when the graphics were handled by a PicassoIV leaving the chipset on very low strain. So with those speeds you can't expect too much. But everything that runs on the processor/memory loop is a different thing. I remember when launching my A500T first time with Blizzard 2060 using just the ECS chipset I was quite disappointed what was happening on the screen. Under two weeks I had acquired a RTG card - what a huge difference!