p4 too slow ?

[KennyR]

This has been common knowledge for some time. Many PC users said that the best Pentium was III, and of course its pretty obvious AMD CPUs were always faster MHz to MHz. And of course, a CPU that struggles to match a G4 clocked at half the cycles is in severe trouble. Combine that with legacy segmented memory addressing and an idiotic interrupt system fit only for the trash, I'm glad Amiga went the PPC route. Ok, they went there half-assed, but they went there.

Recently I bought a CD-RW drive that said "Absolutely minimum specs: 350MHz pentium." Well, it runs just fine on a 040/25, with no problems. I begin to think that the PC universe is MHz in the head. Lets hope the Amiga community doesn't go there too (though I fear many already have).

[KennyR]

Segemented memory addressing makes assembly language a nightmare, so the current situation is that high level language compilers are compiled by other high level compilers, and software doesn't get the asm optimisation it should. Therefore, x86 software gets slower, more bloated and less efficient as time goes on. I compiled HelloWorld.c on visual basic with a fairly basic set of includes in uni and it was 56KB. Combine this inefficiency with the huge instruction decoding time of the x86 and you have a CPU that is propped up only by mounting clock speeds and bigger coolers. Er, no thanks.

On the other hand, PPC asm is a comparitive breeze. The exe's are big, because it is RISC code and needs more instructions, but its a great deal more efficient. It doesn't have 200 extra instructions no-one ever uses, so the decoding time is measured in picoseconds rather that nanoseconds. PPC is a lot better than x86, period.

[KennyR]

Isn't it strange that it seems to be Amithlon users/wanters that defend the x86? :-D Personally, I think that the only positive point of the x86 is low price. Other CPUs do the job more elegantly and better.

And yes, Kronos, people do still use asm optimisation and coding, just not on the x86. For other platforms, using visual basic to compile a new compiler would be unthinkable.

Ok, anyway: you mention all the special things that have been done to shore up the basic 8086 legacy problems. And they seem to be very effective, but there is a limit to how far you can push. You build your foundations on the sand, and no matter how well you build your house, it will collapse in the end. This is the cold, hard truth in the end, no matter how many billions of dollars and millions of man-hours you spend.