What still makes Amiga superior today?

[Hammer]

Autoconfig- what plug-and-play should be. Shove a card in the trap door: INSTANT speed-up, no IRQ, No drivers.

Without drivers, add-on cards like CyberGraphics would be useless.

IRQ is not an issue in modern X86 PC hardware and OS.

Faster CPU actually means a lot faster system operation, rather than Windows where double your cpu clock and you barely notice.

Modern X86 CPUs are already running significantly faster than the rest the computer e.g. CPU clock speed vs main memory vs harddisk.  

There are other areas that reduces the performance in the  PC e.g. harddisk and main memory.

In X86 PC land, increasing main memory capacity and installing faster hard disk benefits more than installing faster CPU.

[Hammer]

Yeah, but Windows doesn't know the hardware is installed until the driver is available. Actually, Windows knows "something" is there.

Not just "something" is there i.e. Windows (2K/XP in this case) knows the following
1. vendor id.
2. device id.
3. subsys id.

In http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/aralves/WindowsLiveWriter/Finddriversforanunknowndevice_E3DB/image_2.png
Windows XP already know this device type i.e. multimedia audio controller.

In http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/s845wd1-e/sb/cs-007297.htm
Windows XP already know this device type i.e. ethernet controller.

 It just doesn't know what it is until it has a driver. Autoconfig lets the system be fully aware of the hardware without requiring additional software to enable it.

What happens if I wipe out P96 drivers? Can you still use the graphics device?

[Hammer]

Have a look at Vista: what does it need to install (recommend) 12G of hard drive space. I have most of the text and pictures of the Encylclopeadia Brittanica and it fits on one 650 Mb CD. How can it take possibly take more information than whats in an encyclopedia to make a hard drive arrange its data in order, suck information of it or a DVD, put the info into memory so that the CPU can do something to it, show some windows and move a mouse pointer and display the result on a screen or print it out?

Windows provides more than just showing some windows and move a mouse pointer and display the result on a screen.

Windows Print Spooler supports multi-user objects and network printing.

[Hammer]

stefcep2 wrote:
The hardware had DMA

X86 PC also has DMA i.e. recall why AmigaOne’s was labelled "incompetent" compared to modern PC Northbridges.

Should I restart;
1. NVIDIA nForce 2 chipset(1) vs any Amiga chipset debate
2. Intel 965 Express chipset(2) vs any Amiga chipset debate
 
(1) Independent (from CPU) pre-fech cache engine in Northbridge.
(2) Incorporates Intel's Fast Memory Access engine (out-of-order processing).
http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/q965_q963/demo/demo.html

 and co-processors,

But a modern PC has another CPU core. My Radeon HD 3870 runs Fold@Home GPU2 client just fine.

meaning that the sound chip,and the graphics chip could act independently of the CPU.  I am sure this has a lot to do with how smooth Amiga multitasking is and why it was so hard for Windows to do it in "less than 4 meg" (W.Gates)

Install AROS X86 build on X86 PC.

[Hammer]

Matt_H wrote:

I'd think a better example would be a SCSI controller, like the A4091. Full SCSI access with no drivers. Haven't tried SCSI on a PC yet, but the IDE cards I've connected require some form of driver to be installed. Sometimes Windows could find the drivers on its own, sometimes it needed a little help. But it did need them before the cards would function.

Exactly. Good ol' Amiga ROM tags. A hypothetical graphics card could store an RTG system in Flash and be ready for use at power-on (you'd just need something in Devs:Monitors, same as you do for the full NTSC or PAL screenmode database). If I'm not mistaken, P96 and CGX in their current forms aren't ROMable because they rely on some functions only available from disk, but OS4 is moving in the direction of making it possible by converting P96 components into Kickstart modules.

Well, my laptop is fitted with 1GB of Intel's Turbo Memory (Flash Memory).

[Hammer]

I would agree with that. Amiga is a different species. It was targetted for games, real-time audio/video effects (which arcade-type games require), fast game port interface, etc. PCs gaming is like a delayed (after-thought) superficial imposition on the computer-- slower game port, effects have to be done through slower APIs rather than hardware standard (and not all hardware supports all API calls),

PC GPUs changes its micro-architecture nearly every generation. It’s like changing from PPC-to-X86-to-ARM-to-(yet another processing core) nearly every year.

For example
NV Geforce FX 5x00 VILW based architecture.
NV Geforce 6x00/7x00 SIMD/MIMD based architecture.
NV Geforce 8x00 (CUDA) Scalar based architecture.
AMD Radeon X1xxx SIMD/MIMD based architecture.
AMD Radeon HD 3xx0(CTM/CAL) VILW based architecture.

If the game was designed to “hit-the-metal” the hardware would become a “boat anchor” for any architecture changes.

I can’t run Fold@Home GPU2 (written on AMD's CAL) on NV CUDA hardware.

Note why you don’t see any commercial PC games being designed directly on NV's CUDA or AMD's CTM(aka "Close-To-Metal")/CAL. The abstraction layer enables rapid hardware architecture changes without completely killing software compatibility.