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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: filson on April 25, 2003, 12:01:42 PM
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I just read this (old news) from distributed.net.
Myself being bogged down by the MHz race, I thought it would be nice to see a computational comparison of the PPC/x86 processors to sort of iron out some of the doubts about the "slow" PPC's in the Pegasos and A1 boards.
Here's the snippet:
we completed 86,950,894 workunits on our best day. This is 0.12% of the total keyspace meaning that at our peak rate we could expect to exhaust the keyspace in 790 days. Our peak rate of 270,147,024 kkeys/sec is equivalent to 32,504 800MHz Apple PowerBook G4 laptops or 45,998 2GHz AMD Athlon XP machines or (to use some rc5-56 numbers) nearly a half million Pentium Pro 200s.
so there is more to it after all. :-D :-D
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There's nothing worse than using the wrong programs to reach "benchmark" comparisons, and the stuff at distrubuted.net is the worst you could use.
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PPCs are very good at this kind of cache based processing, x86 are very poor. Unfortunately, while I'd love PPC to beat the execrable x86 in speed, it just doesn't. Per MHz it does, obviously...but when was the last time 800MHz was a top end PC? :-(
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;-) Because different architectures are superior to each other in different tasks, I think a better approach is to ask yourself: "Which computer is better at what I want to use it for, and ignore the rest.
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PPC rocks!
x86 sucks!
:roflmao:
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being that i've been away for a while, i haven't been able to respond to your rants :-D
One can not even compare the Pentium to an Athlon processor so what are you wining about??
I just brought this up to cheer up some moody faces, as in showing that even though the PPC's are "old" by todays standards, its not totaly useless.
And besides, most code are coded around the platform with its architecture in mind. data alignment, cache-miss prevention, instruction pipelining and so on.
No one code is the same on diferent machines, not ANSI C/C++, not Java, no nothing.
so cheer up! we can make this work if we realy want to. :-)
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The part that I like about PPC is that i doesn't get as hot as an x86 type cpu... I have a 600Mhz PIII machine at home now and it isn't very fast but it's really nice to put your feet on for a while.
How about the power consumption? x86 has to use more power, so PPC would be more economical?
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@Nightcrawler
The part that I like about PPC is that i doesn't get as hot as an x86 type cpu... I have a 600Mhz PIII machine at home now and it isn't very fast but it's really nice to put your feet on for a while.
Whilst it's true that the full blown x86 CPUs run hotter than the PPC, you need to remember that the CPU is only part of the heat generated in a computer box. Modern graphics cards and hard drives give off a helluva lot of heat too, and they will do so whether the CPU is an x86 or a PPC regardless.
How about the power consumption? x86 has to use more power, so PPC would be more economical?
The economy angle is meaningless unless you plan to run thousands of systems. Where the power consumption comes in is in heat generation and motherboard reliability.
Less power == less heat and less strain on the motherboard.
As with system heat, there are other factors to consider in determining motherboard reliability besides the power it has to carry.
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Can I ask how many people saw the name of this thread and thought "oh no, not this old chestnut again"? :-)
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funny, i thought just the same when i saw you :-D :-D
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MeOW!
bihatch! :-)
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my, oh my! i've made a monkey friend. :-D
wanna continue in the DMZ? ;-)
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Companies other than Intel and AMd make X86 processors. I might add that you can get a 1Ghz X86 computer that runs at 10 watts, just like the 10 watts a 1.3 Ghz underclocked to 1 Ghz Motorola PPC will run at. I wishi I remembered the link, but I swear this is true, it was some article in a PC site about alternative processors to be cheaper.
Also, PPC to X86 is similiar to the CISC->RISC arguments, depending on what you want to do, you can make either just scream with speed.
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Companies other than Intel and AMd make X86 processors. I might add that you can get a 1Ghz X86 computer that runs at 10 watts
I bet they can't hold a candle to AMD/Intel chip performance though... I mean, come on, a friend of mine has a Cyrix 700MHz processor, and it can't even outrun the absolutely ancient P166MMX [o/c'd to 200MHz] based system my parents used to have at Quake 2!
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if only ibm&motorola would get their ass into gear and start increasing the external bus speed a little
and take advantage of DDR
PowerPC has always beaten the x86 when the external clock speed was roughly the same, now they have lost the plot
i suppose they are still good for some tasks but probably not so good for graphics intensive tasks and games
its a shame
but wait for the 970! i would like to see the performance of that compared to a pent. IV
:-)
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Nightcrawler wrote:
The part that I like about PPC is that i doesn't get as hot as an x86 type cpu... I have a 600Mhz PIII machine at home now and it isn't very fast but it's really nice to put your feet on for a while.
How about the power consumption? x86 has to use more power, so PPC would be more economical?
Did you forget relativity cool running “Pentium M”?
From http://news.com.com/2100-1037-996773.html
By contrast, the Pentium M comes with a thermal envelope, or maximum power rating, of 12 to 25 watts.
Refer to http://www.geek.com/procspec/intel/banias.htm
for “Pentium M”’s energy consumption in a table format.
Note that IPC (non-SSE2) of Pentium M (think of it as a supercharged Pentium III/Pentium4 hybrid) is superior compared to Pentium 4 (Northwood core).
Intel has at least two active CPU cores for Pentium label i.e.
1. “Pentium M”, thin and light, IPC bias (for general applications), relatively low power.
2. “Pentium 4”, maximum SSE2 performance (games and encoding), clock speed bias.
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bhoggett wrote:
How about the power consumption? x86 has to use more power, so PPC would be more economical?
The economy angle is meaningless unless you plan to run thousands of systems. Where the power consumption comes in is in heat generation and motherboard reliability.
Less power == less heat and less strain on the motherboard.
It doesn’t stop companies (e.g. Cray) and universities making AMD clustered based ‘supercomputers’.
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mikeymike wrote:
Companies other than Intel and AMd make X86 processors. I might add that you can get a 1Ghz X86 computer that runs at 10 watts
I bet they can't hold a candle to AMD/Intel chip performance though... I mean, come on, a friend of mine has a Cyrix 700MHz processor, and it can't even outrun the absolutely ancient P166MMX [o/c'd to 200MHz] based system my parents used to have at Quake 2!
A VIA's Cyrix III@1Ghz** (64kb L2) is roughtly equal to Intel's Celeron @433Mhz (128kb L2).
**Depending on the CPU core improvements within a particular generation. I recall, Cyrix III still employs P5 style architecture instead of P6 (post-RISC cores with elaborate HW decoders) style architecture.
“Cyrix III” is just a label (for marketing purpose); we need to look at specific CPU core’s name.
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filson wrote:
I just read this (old news) from distributed.net.
Myself being bogged down by the MHz race, I thought it would be nice to see a computational comparison of the PPC/x86 processors to sort of iron out some of the doubts about the "slow" PPC's in the Pegasos and A1 boards.
Here's the snippet:
we completed 86,950,894 workunits on our best day. This is 0.12% of the total keyspace meaning that at our peak rate we could expect to exhaust the keyspace in 790 days. Our peak rate of 270,147,024 kkeys/sec is equivalent to 32,504 800MHz Apple PowerBook G4 laptops or 45,998 2GHz AMD Athlon XP machines or (to use some rc5-56 numbers) nearly a half million Pentium Pro 200s.
It would have been better IF the benchmarks were the real world applications and entertainment titles.
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The cpu in itself might be faster than x86 clocked to the same freq... But sadly ppc has other bottlenecks now, like fsb and ram :-(
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if only ibm&motorola would get their ass into gear and start increasing the external bus speed a little
and take advantage of DDR
Nah. The reason they haven't increased the external bus speed is because it doesn't actually make much difference to a PPC, as neither does the RAM speed. A PPC does virtually all of its calculations by loading code from its registers, and there are much fewer load and store operations to external RAM. So increasing the ram speed isn't effective enough to justify the cost.
The x86 needs fast RAM to work properly because of it's legacy design: it just doesn't have many registers and needs to hit that RAM a lot. This will always be the case.
Anyway, having a lot of very fast cache is usually better.
PPC needs a higher clockspeed and an even more optimised logic, and then it could take on the x86. Potentially, you could push a PPC much farther than an x86 - but sadly we'll probably never see it happen. Apple's small market share isn't enough to justify it.
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KennyR wrote:
Nah. The reason they haven't increased the external bus speed is because it doesn't actually make much difference to a PPC, as neither does the RAM speed.
The CPU’s interface to the outside world must be DDR aware for it to take advantage of DDR technologies.
A PPC does virtually all of its calculations by loading code from its registers, and there are much fewer load and store operations to external RAM.
Note that PPC does have sizable L2 cache.
The x86 needs fast RAM to work properly because of it's legacy design:
False implications. The DEC's Alpha AXP has EV6 bus way before Athlon's EV6 bus. EV6 bus is designed to 400Mhz DDR limit (without overclocking).
(VIA’s implementation of this bus is another question).
Most of AMD’s key engineers are made up of ex-DEC engineers thus their use of EV6 architecture. It's the technology they know i.e. they designed it and they built it (they also designed Hyper-transport link tech).
Lower clocked Athlons (anything below 1.4Ghz) does reasonably OK on SDRAM. One could fit an Athlon 2600+ on the KT133A based chipset (e.g. MSI-6330 V5), but the performance increase would be blunted.
Drop the anti-x86 bias. DDR has nothing to do with x86 legacy design. It's just DEC(and it's employee's skill set) has a better tech than the good old IBM.
Note that DEC was dismantled by the combine might of Compaq(now HP) and Intel.
it just doesn't have many registers and needs to hit that RAM a lot. This will always be the case.
Both the Athlon and Pentium 4 has register renaming regime to get around this problem. DDR has nothing to do with it.
Note that the modern X86 CPU does have L1 and L2 cache, not just RAM.
PPC needs a higher clockspeed and an even more optimised logic, and then it could take on the x86.
G3/G4 needs to get a deeper pipeline for clock speed.
(I recall) PowerPC 970 has ~55 million transistors and pipeline depth almost equaling the AMD’s Athlon. This CPU decode/crash 32bit PPC code before it feeds into it's executing engine (it has 9 pipelines, just like AMD's Athlon). Both the Athlon and Pentium 4 does a similar trick for X86-32 code instead of 32bit PPC code.
The proposed PPC 970 tricks around @ ~1.8Ghz just like the Athlon/Opteron.
Potentially, you could push a PPC much farther than an x86 -
Not without a deeper pipeline (faster transistors path, transistors assigned for clock speed bias, speed faster transistor switching and 'etc'). Refer to PPC 970's example.
IF the current G3/G4 can trick over 1.8Ghz why not IBM clock it to 1.8Ghz? (Why issue a new CPU core at all?)
Recall that PPC 601 is a 64bit and 32bit. I dare you clock your G3/G4 (using Apple's 1.4Ghz chips) to 2.25Ghz and lets see it survives(including the use of LN2 (i.e. liquid nitrogen) cooling.
One of the ways to test its transistors switching technology is to use LN2 cooling.
1. Athlon XP reached to +3Ghz (known)
2. Pentium 4 (Northwood) reached to ~4Ghz (known).
but sadly we'll probably never see it happen. Apple's small market share isn't enough to justify it.
Did you forget IBM's experience in regards to PPC’s clock speed increases?
Motorola/IBM is not battling with newbies in the processor design market; they are basically battling DEC** in some other form. Primarily, AMD and Microsoft (Windows NT’s creator, who also designed DEC’s VMS). To a small extent Intel, ARM, and nVidia (also made up of ex-PA-RISC people (the old HP)).
**Short for “Digital Equipment Corporation”… rumored to want a license of AmigaOS for their new Alpha CPU (back at that time). (Also known as “Digital” – “What ever it takes”/”get ready to win” marketing slogan).
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KennyR: but when was the last time 800MHz was a top end PC?
Well, it is -- if you're talking about an insanely overclocked GFX chip. ;-)
Because different architectures are superior to each other in different tasks, I think a better approach is to ask yourself: "Which computer is better at what I want to use it for, and ignore the rest.
Yay! We need more people like you, Quixote.
Nightcrawler: How about the power consumption?
How about Transmeta? An efficient, low-power CPU didn't do much to improve the battery life of notebooks based on Crusoe, regardless of the performance. There's too much other hardware in a PC box to make just a CPU significant.
In other words, what BHoggett said.
The only real sweet spot of the PPC is silent operation. I've had to put a lot of time and thought into the best way to cool my Athlon, and even considered liquid cooling, until I realized that most liquid cooling systems eventually become rancid with algea and other goop. Ick.
Still, I'm a Photoshopper, so performance eventually trumps silence. It's the way of the world. If PPC eventually becomes popular, I don't think it would be long before we saw many PPC chips suffer from thermal death and a leafblower HSF.
Nah. The reason they haven't increased the external bus speed is because it doesn't actually make much difference to a PPC, as neither does the RAM speed.
I hear this over and over, so can somebody tell me why Apple uses DDR? Do they really get a benefit or is it just for show? Is it needed for other things on the motherboard, or does the CPU benefit, too?
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I hear this over and over, so can somebody tell me why Apple uses DDR? Do they really get a benefit or is it just for show? Is it needed for other things on the motherboard, or does the CPU benefit, too?
I reckon just for show, they don't want to look *that* far behind the times. I guess that they'll fiddled things so that the actual DDR capabilities are ignored and the RAM is actually running in SDR mode, just that the technology is slightly newer and better, hence the very minimal difference in speed.
Of course DDR is going to make a significant difference (if the CPU, RAM and motherboard support it) - at the moment, you have a situation where the CPU is clocked nearly ten times over the RAM clock. This means that every time the CPU makes a request to query values in RAM, it has to wait whatever factor of cycles the CPU is clocked over the RAM, cycles that would have been better spent doing stuff. Every architecture, when doing 'real work' makes significant amounts of calls to system RAM, unless you're going to come up with a CPU that has something like 32MB L1 cache :-)
People, do you realise that UDMA and DDR were advancements made on the same concept? Both advancements were made when designers found they could get away with twice the amount of signals in a cycle, on the rising and falling edge, rather than (I think, could be the other way round) just the rising edge of the signal. Being able to send twice the amount of data than before on virtually any bus is going to have a significant benefit (except of course all you ever use your system for is Solitaire!).
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Waccoon wealized:
Yay! We need more people like you, Quixote.
;-) You are SO right!
:-? Funny. It sounds different when I say it....
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mikeymike mentionedymentioned:
...Being able to send twice the amount of data than before on virtually any bus is going to have a significant benefit (except of course all you ever use your system for is Solitaire!)
;-) That is why the market is almost saturated; most computer users have as much computer as they need. For e-mail, web surfing, keeping inventory and payroll for a business, etc., yesteryear's computers are perfectly adequate. Very few applications really need all the horsepower that they can get.
That’s why manufacturers encourage software developers to create games that use everything you can give them. The salesman’s first job is to make the customer dissatisfied with what he already has.
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filson wrote:
I just read this (old news) from distributed.net.
Myself being bogged down by the MHz race, I thought it would be nice to see a computational comparison of the PPC/x86 processors to sort of iron out some of the doubts about the "slow" PPC's in the Pegasos and A1 boards.
Here's the snippet:
we completed 86,950,894 workunits on our best day. This is 0.12% of the total keyspace meaning that at our peak rate we could expect to exhaust the keyspace in 790 days. Our peak rate of 270,147,024 kkeys/sec is equivalent to 32,504 800MHz Apple PowerBook G4 laptops or 45,998 2GHz AMD Athlon XP machines or (to use some rc5-56 numbers) nearly a half million Pentium Pro 200s.
Just find any OpenSSL benchmarks; the results will show a much different picture....
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That is why the market is almost saturated; most computer users have as much computer as they need. For e-mail, web surfing, keeping inventory and payroll for a business, etc., yesteryear's computers are perfectly adequate. Very few applications really need all the horsepower that they can get.
And there isn't a significant percentage of business users that do "techie things" on computers... gawd. They're who the technology market is aimed at, because they could always do with a bit more performance. I reckon /at least/ once a week there's at least one major part of my system that I wished was faster (spec here (http://www.legolas.com/mikes/mypc.txt)), as the result of some practical piece of work I just used it for (large file comression, loading in a huge file - yesterday a 1GB wav file for processing for example, 3D performance, etc). If absolutely everyone on the planet only needed a PC for office/Internet-type typical apps, then the x86 CPU market wouldn't be anywhere near the 1GHz mark yet, because who is there to sell it to?
A possible counter-argument to that is "Windows", but Microsoft also need the techie computer user market as much as the hardware market does. Otherwise, they'd still be patching Windows 98 and NT 4.0 as the primary priority :-)
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@ Hammer
Just find any OpenSSL benchmarks; the results will show a much different picture....
Hear hear!
Or substitute the word "OpenSSL" for "practical use" :-)
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but, ppc g4 whit altivec support in use is very
powerful processor.... all you know ps2???
there is only 295mhz g4 and there is no pc, what
can run games in that speed!!!!
:-)
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@Hammer
You raise some interesting points, and you've proven me wrong. I can't argue against your technical knowledge. But, basically the reason I say PPC can be theoretically pushed farther than x86 is because it has no legacy to emulate. The modern x86 has many workarounds for the old 8086 architecture, and yet even the best workarounds have overheads. Tricks and kludges don't make for a very efficient CPU, no matter how well they're done. Granted, that doesn't really matter as things stand, since even with its inefficiencies it's still much faster and will stay that way for the forseeable future.
(And sliding OT, this doesn't really remove the problem of any OS on x86 being unmarketable. Software doesn't sell, hardware does, as I'm sure you know. Any commercial OS would have the threefold problem of coming up against Windows, being pirated like crazy, and being consigned to The Hell of Multi-Boot as a subordinate to Windows or Linux. Until this changes, my x86 bias will remain.)
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KennyR wrote:
@Hammer
You raise some interesting points, and you've proven me wrong. I can't argue against your technical knowledge. But, basically the reason I say PPC can be theoretically pushed farther than x86 is because it has no legacy to emulate.
Note that PPC 970 protects PPC based investments i.e. via decode/crush stages. Why not we remove these stages and lets see IF it can run existing 32bit PPC code.
‘Legacy’ itself is not the problem it’s flawed the 8086 era instructions. IF they’re perceived to be flawed, a programmer can just use the modern Pentium Pro era instructions. It's the programmer's choice to use these instructions.
Note that both Intel and AMD have released the ideal programming guidelines for their modern processors.
The modern x86 has many workarounds for the old 8086 architecture,
The lack of general registers is addressed via AMD** and Transmeta** CPU solutions.
**Both vendors supports AMD64/X86-64 ISA.
and yet even the best workarounds have overheads.
That's is why you see Linux kernels complied for a specific x86 class CPUs i.e. 586 kernels only works with Pentium and later x86 CPUs.
Tricks and kludges don't make for a very efficient CPU, no matter how well they're done.
IF they’re perceived to be flawed, a programmer can just use the post-Pentium era instructions.
Granted, that doesn't really matter as things stand, since even with its inefficiencies it's still much faster and will stay that way for the forseeable future.
Note that, there are X86 system programmers who optimize their 'own' code.
(And sliding OT, this doesn't really remove the problem of any OS on x86 being unmarketable.
Note that the Athlon 64/Opteron has increased its general registers to 16, while it keeping the advantages of register renaming regime.
X86 ISA concerns in the higher level languages (3GL and above) is not quite a big deal at this stage.
Software doesn't sell, hardware does, as I'm sure you know.
Not quite, the legacy desktop software investment is the boat anchor for the dominance of X86. Even Intel has to include X86 software (FX32 style) emulator for it’s IA-64****. A response from AMD64/X86-64’s threat. (****IA-64 does have a poor performing X86-32 compatibility mode).
The software is the key. Refer to Beta Max vs VHS wars to illustrate this point. Hardware without software doesn’t offer the total solution.
Any commercial OS would have the threefold problem of coming up against Windows, being pirated like crazy,
I recall X86 Solaris was still available for X86 class CPUs. To bad they are not seriously targeting for home/office desktop use i.e. lack of SUN support for leisure based applications.
and being consigned to The Hell of Multi-Boot as a subordinate to Windows or Linux. Until this changes, my x86 bias will remain.)
Will a different ISA stop Microsoft? IF the PowerPC market size make sense for Microsoft, who can stop them? Remember, they also followed the RISC hype for their Windows NT 4.0 products. I can still remember DEC Alpha version Windows NT 4.0. I think, I still have non-X86 Windows NT 4.0 CDs sitting on the self (somewhere).
At a smaller extent, MS’s Windows CE still covers MIPS and ARM RISC CPU families. It's no surprise that AMD and Intel support both either one of these RISC CPU families.
Note that Linux is available for PPC platform, thus one can not stop the potential dual AmigaOS and Linux setups.
Personally, the type of ISA is not an issue to me (since I program with 3GL and above), it about price and offering the solution.
Playing with AmigaOS remains as a hobby(i.e. "leisure computing") of mine, just like my original A500/A1200. IF Eyetech delivers a (reasonably high performance) PPC solution within the A500/A1200 target price bracket, then I would be open for purchasing the product. I do like Eyetech’s goals for the return of AmigaOS platform (via reasonably cheap PPC solution) into the mainstream shops.
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but, ppc g4 whit altivec support in use is very
powerful processor.... all you know ps2???
there is only 295mhz g4 and there is no pc, what
can run games in that speed!!!!
Playstation2 uses Mips not PPC
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mips_proc wrote:
but, ppc g4 whit altivec support in use is very
powerful processor.... all you know ps2???
there is only 295mhz g4 and there is no pc, what
can run games in that speed!!!!
Playstation2 uses Mips not PPC
i know the ps2 doesnt use ppc, but i didnt know it used mips,
got any sources/links for tech. specs for ps2? :-)
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about the whole X86-piracy/etc thing... I think its better to sell 100,000 copys and get 10,000,000 pirates then it is to sell 5000 copys and get 0 pirates...'generic' high performance hardware is the wave of the future... I've said it before but I'll say it again... the future dosent belong to 'custom' hardware sets... they cost to much and perform to little... PPC is alright for the time bieng...I dont see it as that big a deal anymore... (I ended up getting a TiBook 667mhz)... but I do think it is a minor issue... X86-64 from AMD is going to be dirt cheap eventually and it's bound to have a brite future... I cant see it as a bad step if there was an amiga compatible OS for it... thats why I think AROS does have a future of sorts...
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iamaboringperson
here is a page on it
http://www.us.playstation.com/hardware/PS2/415007657.asp (http://www.us.playstation.com/hardware/PS2/415007657.asp)
thats the 'offical' source there... but if you type 'playstation mips' into a google search you can find plenty of sites that get more into detail...
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Sloxa wrote:
but, ppc g4 whit altivec support in use is very
powerful processor....
IPC alone has limits.
all you know ps2???
there is only 295mhz g4
Sony’s Playstation 2 doesn't run on PowerPC G4. Are you referring to the Nintendo’s Game Cube (i.e. I recall it's running PowerPC 40x based CPU family)?
To bad this baby box (Game Cube) doesn’t have all the usual AmigaOS related add-ons (i.e. word processing, drawing, paint, wave/ midi editors, keyboard, TCP/IP, LAN, mouse, Blitz/AMOS basic, multimedia content apps (e.g. Cando, Scala), and ‘etc’. (This is on top of playing games).
and there is no pc,
IF you are referring to the Nintendo’s Game Cube, it's GPU was made by ATI. A name well known in the desktop X86 PC world.
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by mips_proc on 2003/4/30 20:41:12
X86-64 from AMD is going to be dirt cheap eventually and it's bound to have a brite future... I cant see it as a bad step if there was an amiga compatible OS for it... thats why I think AROS does have a future of sorts...
A decent mean and lean OS running on one of those cheap super beasts should make a few people take note on, and hopefully develope some commercial applications for AROS.
Dammy
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I think Quixote has already mentioned this in part, but this really another 'horses for course' situation.
Recently, when I got back into the Amiga, I got a few sneers from friends...'What do you want one of them for'. But really I should be asking that question of THEIR computers!
It is perhaps a bit of a particularly male feature, but there's always this 'mine is better than yours' argument going on. I still hear grown men showing off about how their computer/car/mobile phone etc is better than the next man's, but so what?
How many of us know people who have had the 'best computer available' sold to them by the local computer warehouse (e.g. PC World in the UK). But what are they going to use it for? Surfing the internet perhaps, word processing, printing out digital camera photos? Until recently I was using a P120 laptop at home - for surfing the net, using Word and Excel, in fact I could still probably do so now... I now have a PII 400 laptop and use it for the same kind of thing, except I use the USB port for my digital camera...
I will still get people telling me how their computer is better than mine, but I don't have time for their 'penis size insecurities', if you'd forgive the expression. What would I do with a super-fast computer? Nothing! Except play games perhaps....
One thing my computer tech (in the Physics dept at college) DID say, is that 'if it wasn't for the games-players us scientists would have much slower computers'!
AND, one more point...:-D
Would you say to someone with, say a classic Jaguar E-type convertible, 'your car's crap. why don't you buy a newer faster one like mine?', I think not, as he is happy with his car and what it does for him....