Crappy comparison of Amiga 1200 vs Atari Falcon

[kovacm]

The 68030 in a falcon has no way of accessing any memory at 32 bit. In the Atari world ST-RAM is equivalent to 16 bit chip ram and TT-RAM is 32 bit fast ram, the falcon (without an accelerator) only supports ST-RAM.

no.
at least, strictly speaking:
in Atari world how many bits RAM have does not determine it's name. Name is determinate if RAM is accessible by custom chips.
ST-RAM is ram that is accessible by custom chips (video, audio) and
TT-RAM is accessible only by CPU and not by custom chips

TT-RAM usually is 32bit but e.g. on Atari ST you can have TT-RAM (if you have more than 4MB) but it will be accessed also in 16bit and will be not accessible by custom chips (I think that it is same on e.g. Amiga 500/600: FastRAM would be no faster than ChipRAM coz it will be also 16bit and will be no accessible by custom chips).

So to get good performance you have to pay just as much for as an accelerator as you do on the A1200. Which makes the choice of 68030 rather strange. It's obviously a 68000 design with a 68030 shoe horned in as they only connect 24 address lines. The A1200 on the other hand can get 32 bit fast ram with just a cheap trapdoor ram upgrade. Although the A1200 is limited to 24 address lines unless you buy an accelerator.

memory read/write speed of stock Atari Falcon is faster than stock Amiga 1200:
Falcon ST-Ram R/W 32bits (MB/s): 5.345 / 6.488 (nembench)
Amiga ChipRam R/W 32bits (MB/s):  3.020 / 5.330 (SysSpeed)
Amiga access ChipRAM RAM in 32bit at ~7MHz and Falcon access ST-RAM in 16bit at 16MHz. Videl (video chip) access ST-RAM in 32bits burst mode. ChipRAM in Amiga 1200 is 250ns and in Falcon 120ns.

BUT on Amiga you could easily (and cheaply!) add FastRAM and outperformance Falcon in memory performances (with FastRAM A1200 should be two times faster?)!

Which makes the choice of 68030 rather strange.

Reason for 68030 is probably MMU so MiNT (MultiTOS) could use memory protection.

and btw MMU in Falcon made X68000 emulator possible
Cho Ren Sha - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voiRnr72YhQ
Pac-Mania - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HELyQzBSB9M
Galaga 88 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOH_uMRSrDY
and in future maybe NeoGeo if Anima summon some dark magic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxPCYeHtg60

[kovacm]

Don't forget that the Falcon was also horribly crippled by it's SW (read TOS) which allready was in legacy hell as it wasn't really planned for multitasking or HW expansion.

GEMDOS / TOS from start have support for Accessories.
Accessories are programs that are available from main application so TOS from start could run few programs at same time. Basic for multitasking was there from start but roas was long!
Eventually Atari got three major multitasking OSs: MagiC!, Geneva and MultiTOS (MiNT). Latest have even memory protection.

More about evolution and insides about TOS: http://www.fultonsoft.com/category/atari-st/revisiting-gem-for-the-atari-st/

Plenty other fields were a stock Falcon was utterly useless compared to a stock A1200.

not sure why Falcon would be useless in any field?!

here you have Atari software database with screenshots and some animations: http://milan.kovac.cc/atari/software/

there are software for any field!

[kovacm]

No. Just no. Don't use crappy software when you want to get your facts right.
The hw bandwidth is 7MB/s read/write. Use 'bustest' to check how good your cpu is at getting the full bandwidth (I can't remember what the plain 1200 does, but it should be close to the theoretical max).

hm, ok. But I quote sysspeed numbers since they are better than BusTest. I am pretty sure that something is wrong with these BusTest numbers that I found on internet (can someone verify them on stock A1200?):

Falcon ST-Ram R/W 32bits (MB/s): 5.345 / 6.488 (nembench)
Amiga ChipRam R/W 32bits (MB/s): 3.900 / 3.900 (bustest)
Amiga FastRAM R/W 32bits (MB/s): 10.900 / 16.4MB/s

---
Regarding price, I found info in old Usenet thread link:

Base Amiga = 300 UKP
Base Falcon = 600 UKP  (for the 1 MB)
Base Falcon = 900 UKP  (for the 4 MB / 65MB harddrive)

Amiga = 1/2 to 1/3 cost of Falcon

I tried TOS a few times and it was the worst OS  I ever used.

I guess because of this there were many desktop replacement/extension and few different operating system for Atari (all TOS compatibile): Geneva, MagiC!, MultiTOS/MiNT. They improve every aspect of OS over TOS.

And they looks nice on modern hardware - http://www.atari.sk/download/PICs/zview_beta7.jpe

[kovacm]

interesting topics: SIMD and DSP in modern days...

I read that AmigaOne X1000 have XMOS xCORE chip (and XMOS have some roots in Transputer era

is there any practical use of this chip or any demo that would show possibilities of xCORE?


btw IBM Cell looks like DSP: SPE's has it's own memory, no cache...