About multitasking, what's best : AmigaOS, Linux, or Winblows XP ?

[Hammer]

stopthegop wrote:

Hmmm... maybe a hardware issue? I shut down errant processes all the time, and aside from the occasional momentary hang, it's fine. Come to think of it, I don't think I've had to reboot windows due to a (software) crash in years.

Congratulations.  You own the only reliable Wintel box on Planet Earth.  I'm not talking about just one box that I own, I'm talking about literally thousands of different servers and workstations that I've worked on.  I do Field support work (15+ yrs) for a very well know storage systems company -- robotic tape libraries, disk arrays, etc..  

I do Win2K/XP system and application programming in C/C++/ATL/MFC/COM/Win32. My Wintel system is stable enough for rouge (user land) application crashes.

In my experience, when customers report hardware problems (tape drives not being recognized, LUN mapping problems, unable to initialize robotics, unknown path to host, storage unit unavailable, etc, etc, etc...).  I could go on for days..  

These are not normal desktop applications. Are they multitasking issues?

Note that, Windows NT runs into issues if the application crosses user/kernel space divide.

But the problem is almost always software, in spite of what Microsoft or anyone else says.

Depends on third party software's architecture.

[Hammer]

mr_a500 wrote:

To anyone who thinks Windows is unstable I'll pose these questions: how often have you gone to an ATM to draw out money? So many times you can't give a number? Same for most of us. Now, when was the last time you walked up to one and found it had crashed?

I've seen one crashed ATM in the past 5 years.

Guess what OS most of them are running? It begins with 'W' and ends with 's'...

This is getting a bit off topic, but I MUST reply to this.

I have seen ATMs crashed about 12 times in the past 3 years. You know why? It is specifically BECAUSE they switched to Windows. I know this because the company I work for did consulting work for all the major banks in Canada and they ALL had problems after switching. In the entire 16 years before they switched to Windows I had never once seen a single crashed ATM.

(back to the regularly scheduled topic...)

What type of crash e.g. BSOD or terminate application dialog box?

[Hammer]

And thats before we take into account the custom chipset that the Amiga has, which allows the OS to offload tasks from the CPU. Not only is the OS different, but the hardware is completely different. The PC OS expects the CPU to do everything,

The statement "PC OS expects the CPU to do everything" is wrong.

For example, refer to cache coherent DMA issues with AmigaOS 3.x/Classic Amiga HW, AmigaOS 4.0/A1 HW vs modern PC HW/mainstream OS.  

Unlike AmigaOS3.x/4.x, both Linux X86 and Windows expects the hardware to do cache coherent DMA functions transparently.  

AMD K8’s integrated Northbridge can speculatively pre-fetch data without OS or CPU’s intervention. This is also true for nVidia’s nForce 2 Northbridge (for K7).  

AMD's hypertransport links operates transparently in X86 OSes without specific hypertransport support.

In "pure" DX8 and DX9 PC HW, Vextex and Pixel Shaders are programs for GpGPU. CPU may intervene for JIT shader re-compile. Think of it like a JIT SIMD/MIMD re-complier for GPU’s SIMD/MIMD shader engine i.e. for maximizing specific GpGPU features and frame rates.

We all know the results of CPU driven DX 3D 7/8/9 Reference Render vs DX 3D 7/8/9 HW render in regards to frame rates.  

AmigaDOS doesn't. Ok, so the PC has GPUs... these didnt really come of age until, say the advent of the Nvidia G-Force Yes, I know there have been grpahics accelerators for the PC since the 80s, but these really relied on optimised CPU drivers.

They are not CPU drivers. In basic Windows API accelerators, line draws is offloaded to 2D accelerators.

One could argue that is still the case, as a driver is still needed for the latest video card or physics processor,

Gfx's driver maps to Windows API.

[Hammer]

The reason your A3000 crashes on you is because, conciously or not, you're probably trying to use the Amiga in the same way you use your wintel box. If your Amiga had unlimited memory, a faster system bus, and updated chipset all those "queen-size" applications would run much better and more efficiently than on a PC simply because the basic architecture (of the Amiga) is superior.

Run AmigaOS3.9 in WinUAE 1.3 on a modern PC with 2GB of dual channel DDR-2 800 ram. A "userland" application can still crash(reboot) the AmigaOS environment.

[Hammer]

chsedge wrote:
(SNIP)

Yes your 10 month PC is obsolete, the AMIGA obviously not. The AMIGA is the only computer that will never be obsolete...

Depends on the “PC”.

My two year AMD64 laptop PC with 1GB ram and a Radeon 9600 mobile GPU can still run Vista X64/WinXP X64 edition and IA-32/X64 applications.