PC still playing Amiga catchup

[persia]

You aren't going to drive a daisy chain of half a dozen hi-res monitors with 2 MB of video ram...

[persia]

And of course a Vax has a punch card reader attached to it, which is arguably more useful that a parallel port, so Vax still rules!

That all depends on what the job is. My A1, for example would be dozens of times slower than my current linux box for the stuff I'm experimenting with at the moment and my classic machine many times slower again. My 040 manages say, what, 3.5 MFLOPS peak? Assuming I could write the necessary code in assembler to maintain that throughput (totally overlooking the complete lack of memory speed) that's about 101,000 times slower than my current PC manages. In reality it would be even slower given how slow the fsqrt instruction is (ie you'd never get the 3.5MFLOPS for these calculations).



Don't get me wrong, I love using my old miggies, but when it comes to work, it's all horses for courses.



Not enough of a market, sadly.



Can't argue with that. I use ubuntu on my home PC, though work requires that I use fedora.

I already did-- you have a very shallow understanding of PC architecture so you did not even see it.  Reading joysticks on PC vs. reading joysticks on Amiga is a clear cut example where Amiga wins hands down.  Do you need exact numbers?  I have done the timing tests on PCs going from 90Mhz up to 2.8Ghz.  I have many more examples where Amiga wins over PCs, but if you don't understand this example others will be very difficult for you.

>There's no greater demonstration of how far behind the amiga is in hardware terms than a quick glance at the hardware upgrades that are available for it...

I have a PC hooked up to my Amiga so I guess my Amiga is better than your PC since I can consider the PC as a new hardware add-on.

>You are probably sitting there, p!ssed at me, thinking I'm some PC fanboy and that I hate the Amiga etc. The fact is, you couldn't be more wrong...

No, I'm not pissed off at anyone.  You are just wrong in stating that PC has surpassed Amiga in all respects and that's all I'm pointing out since some blind followers seem to be taking your views.  In fact, Amiga just surpassed PC in another catagory without even doing further research/development.  Parallel ports are no longer put on new PCs so Amiga has another thing that PCs don't have.  The ability to do parallel port based software projects.

[persia]

My wife has throw away technology, a single core P4 @3 GHz.  It runs Vista Ultimate just fine.  You have to either image the 90% of people who buy PCs are either thick or sheep (or maybe thick sheep) to explain why the PC dominates the market.  People aren't stupid, there are reasons why people buy PCs and not Amigas.  The Amiga was phenomenal a decade and a half ago, it failed to capitalise on that superiority and was left an orphan.  They Amiga is a couple orders of magnitude out of date as far as price versus performace goes.  I can buy a gig of Ram for a PC for less money than I can buy a meg of Ram for my Amiga.

Yeah, I love my Amiga but it just feels old, the graphics are poor, the choice of software extremely limited, and a rogue program will bring the whole system to a guru because there's no memory protection.

I can't play the game and pretend it's 1992 again...

that my friend is the elephant in the room that you can't see:  you are running a 7 year old OS on hardware specs that are more or less 12 months old.  try running XP on a p3 600 with 256 meg ram, hey that was the average PC when XP came out.  And run Word 2003, a web browser an email client and see how much you enjoy it.  you might not even be able to open the start menu for all the hard drive groaning you'll get..

your system runs ok because you are using the "if its slow, then throw more hardware at it' philosphy.

[persia]

A realistic photo for someone who is doing more than just shooting family shots would be 12 to 14 MP Raw.  Not something you could edit on an Amiga.  This whole discussion entered never-never land a while ago, with one side mentioning DVDs, MP3s, Flashing, photos etc and the other side countering with some incomprehensible joystick argument.

As stated earlier in this thread a C16 boots in under a second, but to quote you, it's a "Pointless argument.."

The 78MP TIFF image is just an example, ripping a DVD, something that the average PC user does quite a lot of, is another example of something that would take a ridiculously long time on an Amiga.

[persia]

Hah my notebook beat the Amiga, I just flip the page and put my pencil done and I'm off.

Noterbook: ready instantly
Amiga: has to boot up

Notebook: start writing instantly
Amiga: have to load a word processing program

Notebook: can use anywhere, any time
Amiga: needs electricity

[persia]

The point is that Amiga virus protection lay really in the miniscule amount of users.  "New Amiga virus released, dozens panic worldwide" is not likely to make Headline News.

[persia]

Just saw this joystick.  Looks like it would be neat to use with UAE.

http://www.thumbsupuk.com/products/USB-Classic-Joystick.htm?id=3&subid=&prodid=562&cc=

[persia]

Karlos,

Yep, you've got it, the Amiga reminds me of a much simpler time, I can just fire up a game and suddenly it's 1989 again and I'm in the wild old days, it's nostalgia, and in a way I get the same feeling from my iPhone.  But as far as dong serious video, image or music editing, well, I wouldn't dream of using my iPhone or Amiga, all though the iPhone, no, scratch that thought...

I live in the present, I don't have time for the Amigas frequent trips to the guru, lack of software, and seriously low powered hardware when I have work to do.

[persia]

The world is moving towards more distance between the programs and hardware.  You have several cores each running at 3 GHz, a bus running in the GHz range, USB 2 running in the 100 MHz range, the hardware has evolved to a point it responds faster than a human can react with it.

The speed of the equipment has also eliminated the need for ports that do only one thing, nowadays your USB port can do everything, so you can plug anything from a monitor or printer to a joystick or mouse into them, no more worrying about not having the right port or the right number of ports.  I would never dream of going back to the old days.

Living in 2009 and loving it!

[persia]

Banging the hardware was a cheat, it allowed you to do things on the underpowered machines of the '80s that simply wouldn't be possible if you had to wait for the OS to do them.  The trade off was stability, you have code going around the already unstable OS to bang at hardware that may or may not have changed.  Amiga graphics were simple, a single chip and a few meg of RAM.  Today's graphics are much more complex, a half gig of RAM, a GPU and other hardware.  It's like comparing a sundial with an atomic clock, there is no comparison.

You have power, you have speed, you have an OS with memory protection and now you have drivers in user space.  Trying to bang the hardware in a dual quad core processor with GPU environment is just stupid.  Especially to try to read the bounce of a joystick...

You got a FSB in the GHz range, on a 4000 you've got a bus speed of max 25 MHz.  Your talking to the GPU over an order of magnitude faster than the Amiga talked to Fast RAM.

[persia]

I was surprised to see how easy it was to move my OS X apps to iPhone, different processor, completely different hardware and just a bit of screen real estate redesign and it's done.  I lived through the bang the hardware age once, thank Ahura Mazda it's gone!

[persia]

Yeah, yeah, we all know about reading joystick bounce, but I can't think of a practical application for it.  

It makes sense to hardware control a bi-plane, it does not make the same sense in an A380.  

You just expressed your emotional fanaticism of PCs without even addressing the point.  It's better for PCs to have both APIs and hardware level compatibility than just API access.  You have less options with just API access.  Now given you just have APi access vs. an Amiga which has both, for certain real-time applications, Amiga does better.

[persia]

Why is is quicker to have the main CPU(s) interacting with the memory space of the GPU?  Is that just a waste of CPU cycles?  Why should the CPU even be concerned with graphics once it's passed off the information?  Aren't modern GPUs just and extension of what the Amiga was trying to do with it's graphics chips?  

In a way you could say that Amiga lost the computer race but it's ideas and goals won.

You just expressed your emotional fanaticism of PCs without even addressing the point.  It's better for PCs to have both APIs and hardware level compatibility than just API access.  You have less options with just API access.  Now given you just have APi access vs. an Amiga which has both, for certain real-time applications, Amiga does better.

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

(1) Faster code
(2) Faster response time (worst case analysis) and exactly knowing what is happening (for real-time stuff)
(3) No drivers required; they all use same driver (like VGA standard)
(4) Smaller and efficient code means less resources are used.
etc.

>Less efficient when dealing complex abstract objects.

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.

>My CUDA GPU is faster than Amiga's changing palette capabilities i.e. the compute wavefront is larger. The purpose pixel shader is .... pixel processing.

"My" is the keyword.  Is it generic enough?

[persia]

An internal Blu Ray drive will run around US$110.  So it should have been a bog standard PC + US$110.  The news said the US turned off it's non-HD TV last Saturday, where does that leave non-HD Amigas?

I hate to nitpick, but he stated 'probably 15 years ago'.
I'd hardly see you doing any of those things on a bog standard PC from 1994

Heck, most of the PC's out there today can't do all of those things, let alone at the same time.

(Disclaimer: this does not mean I don't feel PC's have long since surpassed the old Amiga, it merely means I feel most people on these boards overstate the capabilities of the average PC)

[persia]

It really hard to think of a use for a floppy, they hold about a quarter of an average song or half a holiday snap.  My Flash drive is far smaller and holds 8 GB.

My experience with floppies was not a happy one, they were prone to failure, slow and just cantankerous.   I don't miss them one bit.

I hate to nitpick, but he stated 'probably 15 years ago'.
I'd hardly see you doing any of those things on a bog standard PC from 1994

Heck, most of the PC's out there today can't do all of those things, let alone at the same time.

(Disclaimer: this does not mean I don't feel PC's have long since surpassed the old Amiga, it merely means I feel most people on these boards overstate the capabilities of the average PC)

It's true that my current system has a multiformat card reader where the floppy might fir but my old AMD duron has a floppy disk drive and I never had any problems using it with either Win2K, WinXP or Linux.

I do fully recognise the "floppy death" syndrome that seems to infect PC's from a decade ago when people were using Win9x. I think it had more to do with the design of Windows than the hardware.

Actually, my work PC also has a floppy drive. Let me mount /dev/floppy and see what it does...