PC still playing Amiga catchup

[the_leander]

Refer to http://www.chip-architect.com/news/2003_09_21_Detailed_Architecture_of_AMDs_64bit_Core.html

It's about 10 percent for K8 Sledgehammer. The legacy tax is more apparent when you implement this as a GPU i.e. maximising math unit counts.

Ahh, cheers for that! I am curious though how it compares to other processors in the x86 family now though.

But again, thanks for pointing me to that.

[the_leander]

Not to mention the Peg. Wasn't there some talk also of OS4 being able to run on a MacMini as well?

[the_leander]

Complete rubbish-- didn't even address the point.  I gave an EXAMPLE of parallel port.  You can have hardware level compatibility for ANY DEVICE.

Your point was irrelevant as a parallel port from 20 years ago is still a parallel port today, it's not been improved upon or had its function changed in all that time. Yes you could get some PCI card to add back that functionality. But then you're fighting your own complaint about it being nonstandard. Things have changed. USB is pretty much all you'll find on the back of a PC these days. As I stated (and you ignored) once you move beyond the basics and start having to add support for as many layers as have been added to GPUs you are creating sreious headaches for yourself.

Re-read:

When you add a brand new feature, you assing new standard I/O ports-- you maintain the previous ones.  Like they maintained CGA/EGA when making VGA.

Not always, in some cases new I/O completely replaces the old, as with USB, as with things like hypertransport, as with things like PCI-E. With 3D effects being added and with huge architecture changes, maintaining the compatability for more then the basics, for GPU's would be a monumental pita and be hugely detrimental to performance.

Get a clue.

You first.

[the_leander]

If most of planet is PC-based, retarget capability is minor in comparison to what you get with hardware level compatibility:

(1) Faster code

On slower GPUs that take an order of magnitude longer to code for.

(2) Faster response time (worst case analysis) and exactly knowing what is happening (for real-time stuff)

Which works fine right up to the point your "perfect" app ends up in IRQ or I/O conflict with one or more other applications.

(3) No drivers required; they all use same driver (like VGA standard)

lulwut? Of course a driver is going to be required, do you seriously intend to have everyone write their own partial drivers implimenting only the bits they need... Your way would make Windows95 look stable by comparason.

(4) Smaller and efficient code means less resources are used.
etc.

Which you then have to make sure doesn't interact badly with other code also running, meaning having to test against hundreds if not thousands of other applications, each with their own custom code for accessing I/O, memory, GPU, sound etc.

I have yet to see someone here to prove to me that API is required once you make a piece of hardware have more functionality.  Making a piece of hardware more complex has no realtionship to whether it uses API-based compatibility or hardware compatibility.

It does when your application has to acces that functionality in terms of the time it takes to build, it is not that you get more functionality, it's that you get that functionality with far far less effort with an API.

[the_leander]

Well the example is quite precisely defined.  You need to swap two color indices.  I know even for standard vga there's a fast way to upload entire palette but doing particular indices is slower per index time.  So let's see the code where user requests index 3 swapped with index 15 and works for majority of PCs.

Out of curiosity, given that most (if not all) PCs are capable of running a 32bit screendepth, how necesary would it be to swap and change parts of the palette? I mean I can understand if you're working in a colour limited environment like OCS or AGA, but truecolour? How common would such a requirement be?

[the_leander]

This shows your ignorance of parallel ports.  As I said "get a clue".  The example is good.

Ok then, what do they have now that wasn't in good quality gear from 20 years ago? And how many itterations are there? Also, just as one final point. What can you do with them now, that wasn't possible 20 years ago?

Either way you failed to address the rest of the point.

[the_leander]

I was speaking in general about API vs. hardware level compatibility not GPU.  

>Which works fine right up to the point your "perfect" app ends up in IRQ or I/O conflict with one or more other applications.

Wrong as already explained.

No, I don't think you did, how do you propose to prevent these sorts of conflicts outside of an API, remember we did have this, much to the detriment of stability, see Win95 and 98 for details.

Just because you can create the "perfect" app doesn't mean that everyone can.

>lulwut? Of course a driver is going to be required, do you seriously intend to have everyone write their own partial drivers implimenting only the bits they need... Your way would make Windows95 look stable by comparason.

Wrong, drivers aren't needed.

If you're having to reinvent the wheel and have every application bang the metal to the extent the app requires, you are in effect writing a (partial) driver or framework for your application to sit on. You then have the joy of making sure others, doing the same thing don't cause collisions of I/O. As both hardware and applications become ever more complex (see for instance the list of things your average web browser can do and work out just what it would require to do it via your model) I can only see such a model ending in tears.

No, wait. I've actually seen it end in tears (see windows from 95 onwards), which is why most if not all OS's today don't allow for direct hardware banging.

In fact, the more I think about this the more I realise that at some point you'd end up with defacto API's anyway - companies or individuals would begin to specialise and coalesce on different parts of the arch, either sharing outright their individual frameworks or licensing them. You would at some point see these various parts trading information so as to allow for better interoperability and stability or even merging.

In the end you'd end up with either a small group of companies producing a framework from which all else is built, or more or less what you have now with Microsoft.

At which point, why bother having all the extra drain of retaining compatability at all.

>It does when your application has to acces that functionality in terms of the time it takes to build, it is not that you get more functionality, it's that you get that functionality with far far less effort with an API.

"It takes less effort" is subjective and your opinion nor is it a strong argument given the gains of having hardware compatibility.  

The gains of hardware compatability, yes, lets add 10, 20, 30% extra silicon to every major I/O chip for stuff that's no longer used and long dead... Your entire argument is based on a fairytale world.

Stop misquoting me-- you did it again.

Not in that post I didn't. If you're seriously going to bitch about me breaking up your posts to address single points for the sake of readability (which btw is generally the accepted standard and has been since usenet) then I suggest you leave the internet.

[the_leander]

So far no one has shown how to surpass Amiga joystick port in speed using Game port nor via USB joysticks available.

Liar.

USB multifunction modules that provides 1 MHz sampling speed .
http://www.iotech.com/products/pdaq3s.htm

USB modules that provides 2 MHz sampling speed.
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-15005752_ITM

"High Speed" USB has 125 usec to 4 sec maximum latency with bInterval 125 usec.
"Full Speed" USB has 1 msec to 255 msec maximum latency with bInterval 1 msec.

Most USB devices today are developed using a microcontroller, the microcontroller can be used to
queue up the data  and make it available to the host in larger transfers, thereby decreasing the number
of transfers and increasing the size of each transfer and increasing efficiency.

Depending on many factors the host processor may not be able to transfer the interrupt data at
the requested interval. OS design, driver design, application software, CPU speed, and bus
bandwidth may all limit the host’s ability to meet the obligation to poll for interrupt transfer data
within the required interval.

This is why.

So far no one has shown why API-based systems are superior to hardware level compatibility.  

They have, that you dismissed the points out of hand, moved the goalposts or just attacked the poster and continued to bang on about your fairyland instead is irrelevant.

So far no one has shown that simple example of palette index swap is faster using APIs.

I believe Karlos did that already, you then moved the goalposts.

So I don't know what you are reading.  Perhaps you need glasses.

NO U.

[the_leander]

Or they say: "fast booting doesn't matter to me" , or "fast shut down doesn't matter to me" or

They don't, many people simply use standby thus negating the issue. Thanks to memory protection, it is rare that a piece of software will take down the rest of the OS.

 

"jerky menus don't happen"

Jerky menus? Take an A1200, put a load on the cpu and watch as the rest of the system slows to a crawl.

I have a dual P2 (233Mhz) system here running BeOS, the cpus when running live streaming are constantly at 80%. The menus are just as fast as when the system is idling. Only difference is that app loading slows down, which is to be expected.

"malwares only a consequence of how popular the PC is, so that makes it ok"

Malware is a consiquence of people not bothering to secure their systems. It is not ok.

"the registry isn't so bad", knowing full well that the registry is an abomination

The registry is a database. If you can come up with a better solution to address being able to support and intergrate litterally hundreds of thousands of different pieces of hardware, the rest of the computing world would love to know. Linux, BeOS and (I believe) Mac all use a database help address this issue.

or a Linux PC 'just works' because they know a Linux PC can easily send you into command line hell just to get the hardware working at all, or to get the GUI up.

That was 2000 calling, their want their distribution back. And flaky hardware drivers are not a linux specific issue.

You see if it doesn't matter to them, these things can be ignored and therefore the argument is WON.

Correct, because many of the issues do not matter to the average user - they just want to use their applications. I for one am happy that I don't have to write my own scripts to get a cd-rom to run when I plug it in.

[the_leander]

thanks to saving regularly, booting in 5 seconds, and using stable well written software, memory protection doesn't matter to me.  I'd like it but I bet you'd like a 5 second boot as well.  But to use your argument against you, memory protection doesn't matter to me, so Amiga wins for me.

 
Takes less then 5 seconds for me to come out of standby. And when you have either 3.5 or 3.9 running, just getting beyond softkick takes more then 5 seconds on an 040 1200.

turn on your windows PC, wait for the start button/orb to appear and try to launch something and watch the menu stutter and leave garbage behind before it clears itself.  Makes you feel good about your quadcore 4 gig ram SATA?

I don't have a quadcore. And when you have a lot of high priority things being loaded up/run at once, even on an Amiga with Executive it'll crawl.

i have a freeware scheduler "Executive" and i can render an animation in cinema 4d, whilst editing scenes and objects in Cinema 4D, send the resultant pics to Adpro for processing, save the files automatically, do a spot of house keeping with DOpus, paint a texture in Dpaint and the Operating System menues are just as fast as if had nothing loaded- on a 50 mhz machine with 16 meg ram

And how many of those tasks require a realtime/extremely high priority? The music stream, regardless of all else happening on that machine (building up the database from FS queries, accessing and generating a web interface etc etc etc) all are going on, but the stream remains constant. Yes, I could lower the stream's priority and everything else would run a whole lot faster, but at the risk of breaking the streams continuity.

Even Executive, which I used to use myself, does not offer the level of granularity that BeOS does in terms of task priorty.

malware is a consequence of having security risks in the OS that can be exploited.  

Sorry, but ALL operating systems have security holes. Buffer overflows in MUI anyone?

i don't have one on my Amiga.  It doesn't matter to me.  Therefore Amiga wins.

Clearly it does matter or you wouldn't have mentioned it.

tell the thousands posting here: http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=327 or here :http://forum.mandriva.com/ (just two examples) that they its 2009 and there problems DO NOT EXIST, its just that they are caught in an alternate reality where its always the year 2000

Bad drivers happen, wierd and wonderful issues with hardware mixes happen. This is one of the drawbacks in having such a diverse hardware landscape.

That was 1985 calling, their want their Workbench 1.3 floppy back.

Heh, that was OS3.5, and rigging up an IDE CD-ROM drive on an A1200. Also had to do the same later with a MO drive.

And flaky hardware drivers-if any drivers exist AT all that is- are a particularly linux specific issue.

Flaky drivers can and will happen on just about any OS, I've seen it on AmigaOS, Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD and BeOS... They are by no means specific to any OS.

[the_leander]

Standby does not equal boot.  I asked 14 PC users if they leave the PC on all the time in standby.  None do.  Standby doesn't matter to them.  Boot time does.  Amiga wins.

Woo, because 14 people, out of 1 billion is totally valid for extrapolating how people use their systems. Standby is perfectly valid if you use it. Even if you don't, the Amiga looses to a £1 pocket calculator by this measure.  

Boot time does not matter unless you have to do it an awful lot, on the Amiga, owing to it's lack of MP, it does. On a windows/linux/mac box, you don't, you boot a maximum of once from the last time you turned it on and that is (for the vast majority of cases) all you need.

And in case you're wondering, 14 seconds does me just fine, thanks. I booted my system.... about 8 weeks ago now, so 14 seconds of booting in two months. Suddenly the boot time issue comes into context.

i run Workbench 3.1, the OS my machine came with.  Running OS 3.5 is like running XP on your 233 mhz pentium and OS 3.9 is like running Vista on your 233 mHz pentium.  How would you go booting them?  Will you enjoy that user experience, IF you could even get vista to boot.

Yes 3.5 took longer to boot, as did 3.9. But once up and running I found it to be much more responsive more of the time then 3.1 with all the hacks/trimmings. Not to mention far less crash happy.

 Sorry i thought Karlos's quadcore was "just an average PC", and on that basis i thought you just had an "average PC".

Do you even understand what the word average means? Clearly not.

Ah more "if's" and "whens".  I don't, so it doesn't matter to me.  default priorities are fine for me.  Amiga wins.

I rigged that system up specifically for that one task. In that role, it is superb. The problem with forcing a system to specialise in one thing, is that you do so at the expense of others.

That you don't is not my concern.

None require it.  And they don't need to be.  Therefore it doesn't matter to me.  i don't stream anything, so it doesn't matter to me, either.  Amiga wins.

*shakes head and walks away.

you may be right, i honestly don't know enough about BeOS.  however my A1200 multitasks smoothly, and always prioritises my input over anything else that might be needing CPU time.

This particular system is controled remotely via a web interface.

true.  but as it stands as of this moment, i have a greater chance of suffering from malware on a  fresh out of the box windows install than I do on a fresh amiga os 3.1 install.  The why's, buts, ifs don't matter, thems the facts.

And a stock 3.1 install is by itself useless. Linux, BeOS, hell even windows offers far more capability out of the box then any AmigaOS release ever produced.

only to follow the same line of thinking as the PC camp: "yeah the registry is crap BUT....."  But nothing.  the registry is crap.  My amiga doesn't have one, it doesn't matter to me, amiga wins.

There is no "registry is crap but", did you even bother to read Trev's post?

i see.  Its now a "feature".  Ms PR dept would be proud of that one..

Ugh, grow up. It is a logical consiquence, nothing more.

I see.  

Not on the basis of your replies thus far you don't.

OS 3.5 has many bugs in it.  try OS 3.9, bet it works-unless you have one of those early almost-atapi drives, but thats a firmware fault on the drive, not a fault with the Amiga.

ROTFL. Nothing can be the fault of your perfect Amiga can it?

To be clear, The IDEfix installer produced a script for the drive in question, but for whatever reason that script failed every three or four boots. I wrote my own which didn't.

The MO drive was a little more tricky but in the end it worked fine.

True.  But linux has more of it.

Try telling that to those who run BeOS on modern hardware. Oh, silly me, that's right. Not knowing anything about it you carry on regardless.

[

do you see a theme?

Yes, you twist anything and everything that you can in order that "Amiga wins". It's childish.

If a PC can't do something as well as an amiga, its "PC users don't need it/use it/care about it/ so it doesn't matter". To them.

Given that the vast, vast vast number of PC users today haven't even heard of an Amiga, much less used one and use their computers in a different way to how the amiga is used, it is one hell of a stretch to say that. I can run a rediculously stripped down system that boots in short order too, but unless it can do what I want in a reliable and stable fashion all bets are off.

The amiga, especially once you started trying to go online could never be called the latter. A bridge too far.

  But play that argument in favour of the Amiga as i have, and what happens? Amiga wins.  

Ahh, but you didn't play the same argument. See, with the exception of yourself and amigaski, none of the rest of the folk here had to do mental and linguistic backflips in our interpritations or employ massive cognitive dissonance to "win".

Its pointless, ofcourse and its an argument that can never be lost.

This discussion was originally about technology, a point you clearly missed. Someone made a specific claim of technical superiority, not usage not preference, technical.

[the_leander]

Well, I deal in facts.  I asked 14 PC users, ranging from occasional to moderate users and none used standby.  None are computer hobbyists.  You are a computer hobbyist.  As other people on this board are.  Most people are not. When you survey the other 1 billion PC users out there, post here and tell us all.

Actually I'm firmly in the user camp these days. I've niether the time nor inclination to go around tweeking and tinkering. I just want to do the things I need to do with the minimum of hassle.  
 

Like Is said: When you survey the other 1 billion PC users out there, post here and tell me, and then you can use words such as "for the vast majority of cases".

And when you present documentation to show these people you supposedly surveyed you can claim the opposite.

Strange: 14 random users is too small a sample size, but you and a handful of people on a computer enthusiast's forum is representative of 1 billion users world wide.  just coz you boot evry 8 weeks is not representative of the whole world, but do go on..

Well see, at least from this side, we have more evidence then your say so.

My 3.1 A1200 with all the trimmimgs, as you call them, - that i need- is at least as fast and as stable as 3.9.  I've tried both.

Didn't mention one way or the other whether they were needed, as it happens the vast majority were - I would not for instance be happy using an Amiga without Opus Magellen on it.

i took one semester in Statistics at University level, but please do enlighten me on what the word "average" means.

1.   a quantity, rating, or the like that represents or approximates an arithmetic mean.

But it is irrelevant, you made an assumption, which in this case was false.

I use laptops. And whist you can get quadcore laptops (which generally produce more heat then the legendary nut roasting P4 mobility ones did) mine isn't.

And that you DID, is not mine.  But thats the point isn't it?

Overspecialise and you breed in weakness. More on this further down.

 No, its still useful.  But it can be made a lot nicer with a few add-ons that cost no money.

One of the biggest, and for me nicest parts of moving from AmigaOS was that when I installed BeOS or later Linux, I didn't have to prat around with dozens of disks to install all the other software I needed day to day. So from going from half a day to install, optimise and install all the stuff I needed to... around 20 minutes. It was a revelation and is actually something I miss whenever I had to setup a windows environment. Perhaps I'm spoiled in this.

Amigans call these "scripts" dosdrivers.  Clearly a third-party utility generated a dosdriver with settings that were not compatible with your drive.

Nah, really?!

If I had a dollar that thats happened to me with linux or windows over the years I'd be...you know how it goes.

As does any person who has ever done anything more then just used the factory installed setup.

I find it interesting that people need to bring up just about any PC hardware-OS combination to suit their argument even when that represents less than an insignificant percentage of PC's in the world

BeOS at it's height barely scraped 1% of computer usage. Depending on who you ask, Linux now, with a much more varied landscape has just about hit 1%. The point was that minority OS's all have hardware support troubles.

just to prove a point they've lost.

So you can't win the boot argument with Windows so you bring on the BeOS argument.

Actually, the boot argument is a non starter - it is completely irrelevant when looked at over the long term. It only becomes a concern if your system is prone to crashing a lot. I brought BeOS into it with regard your "jerky menus" complaint. I pointed out that other systems did it better then the Amiga at high loads.

But Windows has the registry

You have not shown why having a database to deal with a huge amount of hardware configurations is a bad thing. Nor have you pointed to a more effective solution.

and malware.

With few exceptions, all OS's have malware for them, even your beloved Amiga.

So linux is in.  But Linux isn't as user-friendly out of the box.

I'd have to disagree there.

But regardless, if nothing else it shows that all OS's have different strengths and weaknesses.

As opposed to the name on everyone's lips: BeOS.  i can do what i need to do on it.  And for evrything else, a simple household appliance or a console can outdo the PC.  And no my Amiga isn't ridiculously stripped down.  But its interesting you have to strip your PC down to a non-functional state in order to compete

Specialist appliances will almost always perform better then a do everything solution. But, as I pointed out with the BeOS streaming server, that specialisation comes at the cost of ubiquity. And yes, the Amiga is ridiculously stripped down compared to a modern OS. To get it to do what I take for granted on a modern OS (any of the ones I have mentioned), I would then have to add that functionality back in in the form of hacks, third party replacements (Magellen) and a pile of support software (such as MiamiDX) that on any remotely modern OS comes as standard with.

Expectations change. I can do more with an EeePC then I ever could with even a top of the line Amiga and for a fraction of the cost. Amiga, as elegant as the whole thing was could not meet my needs, if it meets yours great. But the rest of the world has moved on.

popular opinion isn't always the right one.

By the same token though, taking the oposite side doesn't make you right either.

[the_leander]

Still you can't deny that multi-tasking on the Amiga rocks after all these years. even compared to the latest and greatest from MS.

Given the resources available to the Amiga, yes, what it does with them is nothing short of outstanding by any measure you care to throw at it. No one here I think would deny that.

What's better about the new schedulers?

Combined with ever increasing levels of optimisation on the various window managers, they seem to make for a more.. Responsive? Free flowing perhaps? user experience. Certainly I've not seen an MP3 stutter type issue for a good many years and even then only on very very overtaxed hardware.

That said, if you used lighter weight window managers such as Enlightenment or IceWM, you tended to be ok even on (relatively) old hardware.

[the_leander]

You're on an obscure forum about a commercially dead computer platform espousing the virtues of an even more esoteric OS like BeOS, you are a tinkerer my friend a computer hobbyist.  No shame in that.  But representative of the 1 billion PC users out there you are not.

A long time ago maybe, that BeOS server was an experiment that I found useful and sucessful enough to leave in an operational state. I've not tinkered with any OS or piece of hardware like that since. Nor have I actually touched that system in a while thinking about it.

Indeed my current system is a laptop - bought for a variety of reasons, not least was me not having to tinker.

Does the word "sarcasm" mean anything to you?   I was being sarcastic that a quadcore with 4 gig ram and 600+ mb graphics card was considered "an average PC".  I wasn't really apologizing to you.  Sorry.......err not really, sarcasm again.

You might want to work on that then, it came across as pure condescension.

But interesting point you make.  Once you've set up your Amiga environment, its pretty much done.  Not sure about BeOS, but remind me again what is the experience of the other 99 % of PC users..

Varies depending on their system, many folks these days have vender supplied rescue disks they can lob in to restore in the event of a cataclysm, which not only restores the OS, but the applications. Others, perhaps those who bought their systems from smaller outlets might have an OEM disk and effectively have to reinstall their apps all over again. And then of course there are those that build their own.

Good we agree that Linux and BeOS have hardware support troubles.  

My point was that Linux's support is (and likely was at the time of BeOS) far greater. To say it is an issue that particularly afflicts Linux is misleading.

So lets get on the Windows bandwagon coz it doesn't..but over at MS Land we have that damn pesky registry, where all the malware hides (we think, no-one can be REALLY sure whats meant to be there or not)

Given the vast amount of options Windows supports, what would you propose as a replacement of the registry database? Remembering that both BeOS and Linux have similar systems built into them.

You have a TCP stack in OS 3.5 and Os 3.9.  DOpus 4 is free, it does the job.

The stack that came with 3.5 and 3.9 didn't work with my ISP. Dopus 4 was too limited for me. Either way, functionality that I expected, nay, demanded had to be added into the base install.

Absolutely expectations change.  But there still a few little things or not so little things the PC could learn from the Amiga concept.

In many ways I feel things like the EeePC and Ebox are pretty much there in terms of concept. Macs possibly more so.

I also feel that those small cheep computers will likely pave the way for more appliance like devices that offer base office and web functionality.

[the_leander]

Once you accept that Amiga can swap palette indices faster than API-based modern system

You have not provided one shred of evidence to back that assertion up.

It's been bugging me for days as to why I've had this sense of deja vu...

I know where I've read this sort of crap before. Back in the bygone days of Usenet there was a spacker there who was claiming his A4000's 233Mhz PPC cpu was *faster* then a then top end AthlonXP on the basis that the 604 took something like 3 cycles to execute an instruction compared to the XP's 5, whilst ignoring the fact that the Athlon in question ran at over 2.5Ghz.

How are you doing SG?

[the_leander]

Amigaski/SG as seen earlier in this thread:



Clearly, in need of a liberal application of