Possibly looking for 1260 card

[fishy_fiz]

>There are no doubts. A 500% speedup is impressive.

5 times? No way. I doubt it. Prove that one with a benchmark. I'll even take a relatively invalid one like a mips figure.

And the chipset? All access to sound, graphics, hard drives? Still just as slow with either processor.

Not that any of this really matters because even a 66Mhz '060 in a 4000 is still a really slow processor.

66Mhz? The PCI bus in my G4 Mac runs at that.

A 66mhz '060 is roughly 85-90mips. A 50mhz '030 is about 12. Are these the sorts of figures you was after ? An '060 really is something like the 500% faster figure that was quoted, even more in some cases. Sure AGA can become a bottleneck with heavily graphics intensive stuff, but that's a pretty small portion of the overall picture. How is this hard to believe? There's something like a decade between the cpus. Yes, by modern standards its a slow cpu, but it's the best experience avialable to a classic amiga, so good luck to anyone who trying to get ahold of one.
Even your 4140mips g4 is about 30x slower than current high end cpus (core i7-980x is rated as over 150,000 mips), but as you seem to understand when it's your hobby, raw speed isnt everything. It's about getting the best possible experience for your hobby.

[fishy_fiz]

That's what I was kind of information I was hoping someone would quote me. This is why the difference between real performance gains and figures based solely on CPU performance data are so varied.

OK, now when say you run a video game, what's the increase in FPS when moving from an '030 to an '60? It's certainly not on the order of 5 times, is it?

And my G4 based Powermac, its not really 42 times more powerful than your '60 is it? Not really anymore than an i7 is 30 times more powerful than my G4.

We're completely outside any reasonable comparisons at this point.

The best way to look at this is the same as its always been, via application benchmarks.

So we all are clear on this, a 5  times higher CPU mips rating does not make a system five time "faster". Its a measurement of the CPU alone. And the Amiga relies on a lot of custom chips that gain little from a faster CPU.

The irritating thing is, Chaos knows this. That's why so much of the Natami's design features updated components. Even if you could recreate the original Amiga chipset, would you want to?

Sure, the comparisons are silly, but that was the point. It's all old outdated, redundant technology in the current scheme of things, to point out that a pci bus can run at the same frequency as an '060 was ridiculous, so I responded as such. What does matter is if a user is happy with thier old computer gear, be it a g4 mac or an '060 based amiga.

As for the speed comparisons between an '030 and an '060, the comparisons are real. The cpus themselves are that much slower/faster than each other, but throw a custom chipset based amiga into the equation and things arent often that cut and dry. AGA has a bandwidth of about 14MBps, no cpu in the world is going to change that, and beyond a low end '040 the improvements in terms of gfx throughput arent going to scale the same as the cpu. This however doesnt mean its not a much more pleasant experience with the '060. Things like image decoding on an '030 you have to wait for, and you can see the image draw as it decodes. This sort of thing is massively better on an '060. Any sort of compressions (archives, mp3s, video files,etc.) is going to be a massively superior experience on an '060. Harddrive access, fast ram read/write (which also has a side effect of speeding up thing like fblit, etc.). When dealing with such limited resources an '060 really makes a lot of difference, even if its not going to increase framerates that scale with the cpu (unless using rtg). Gaming is still a better experience though, even with aga maxed out due to better response times from input. Id hazzard a guess at things being maybe 2x as fast in terms of gfx updates vs. '030 in games that arent cpu bound.

[fishy_fiz]

High end (relatively speaking) cpus have always been disproportionally expensive. In fact this is true of nearly all hardware. A 1 gig ddr1 stick for example is more expensive than a 2 gig ddr2-1066 stick, which in turn is more expensive than a 4 gig ddr3-1600 stick. Core2quads are very expensive compared to socket1156/1366/1155 hardware, even though theyre slower. Socket 754 3700+ and especially 4000+ cpus are more expensive tha some new, much more powerful quad core cpus, etc, etc. Simple fact is it's often more expensive to keep an old platform and expand that with the greatest options for that system. It has always been like this, and it always will. Amiga gear even moreso these days, due both to the retro/rare value, and also the fact they offer some things that the "replacement" "NG" systems don't. Sure those things arent really attractive to everyone, but to some they are.

I have to second runequesters sentiment here though too, in that no matter how fast or well priced an x86/ppc cpu is, it still does nothing to enhance my amiga. That said though there's no way Id spend more than $350ish on an classic amiga accelerator, especially a csppc/bppc. Theyre of minimal use to os3.x and too weak to be of much use with a "modern" os (os4.x/mos) (unless you want to do nothing other than tinker with the OS or use existing 68k software).

[fishy_fiz]

Im probably more of a sysspeed fan than sysinfo. That said however Id be interested in something new that's maybe a little more accurate for emulation too. My amithlon box for example can show somewhere between 4500 and 6000 mips when I do a cpu test with sysspeed (although I guess this is partly due to the nature of how the jit emulation works and what's in the translation buffer). Something like a more modest futuremark test could be fun and in some ways more representative of overall system performance (albiet less informative)