PC still playing Amiga catchup

[amigaksi]

Your title is a little misleading.  PCs have had split-screen, multi-monitor and PIP screen displays for years and at resolutions and color depths that put OCS/ECS Amigas to shame.  The days when Amigas made PCs look lame have long since passed.  And those who think that Amigas will somehow rise from the ashes to once again surpass the capabilities of PCs need to seek professional help/therapy.

Anything can happen in the future.  I don't see how you can leave the option out that Amiga can become a marketable computer.  Didn't Apple Mac rise from the dead basically.  I am sure if someone invented a souped up processor running at 1 Terahertz (better than Intel's) and used custom chips backward compatible to Amiga OCS/ECS/AGA, it would take over the market eventually.

PCs haven't had split-screens like Amigas with different resolutions and color depths.  VGA standard only supported split-screens with same resolution and color depth.  Now, the video cards don't have any standard so any split-screens would have to be accessed via an API and software would be emulating the function if it doesn't exist on your video card.

[amigaksi]

You are joking, right? There are hundreds of processes on my PC currently as well as several large applications.

There's also a CUDA simulation running which is pushing hundreds of megabytes of data per second across the PCI express bus and several mysql client processes interrogating a mysql server on the machine resulting in heavy disk IO.

The machine is still as responsive as when none of this was happening.

Just threw EUAE on top of the pile and it's running orders of magnitude faster than my actual amiga

I doubt you have hundreds of processes running your PC.  Many things you see when you pop up the processes dialog box are just terminate and stay resident (TSR) type drivers and applications.  And even if you did have hundreds of processes running, your statement "The machine is still as responsive as when none of this was happening" is false.  It violates the law of conservation (law of physics).  I doubt even more that you can have EUAE running on top with PCI bus busy as it is.  Why only look at the processor speed-- there's other things Amiga can do besides compare processor speeds.  Why don't you try reading the joystick at 1Khz while doing all those things?  Why not time things to cycle accuracy while your running your PCI transfers?  I can't even time a 500Khz event on the latest PC without synchronization going off if I have a WIFI card plugged in (not even surfing the web).  Oh by the way, PCs do slow down to a crawl because so much viruses/spyware comes into the PC easily because no one knows exactly which file is meant for what and whether it's in its original state or tampered.

You are basically stating PCs have faster processor speeds and faster buses.  But that was true even when Amiga 4000 was being marketed and people were still buying it (for other reasons).  So you have said nothing new.

[amigaksi]

No, you are quite right, there were only four at any given instant in time, one for each core*. However, a quick ps aux wwwf | less showed over 150 launched processes at the time I wrote that post.

*not including the 24576 GPU threads that were also active:

Thanks for clarifying.  You are just using some souped up graphics card.  Nothing to do with PC running 100s of processes.  And you forgot to answer the rest of the message.

And you still violate the law of conservation even with quad core since there's still some overhead involved.

[amigaksi]

Right. Do you even understand the difference between a PC and PC running Windows?

You don't understand what a PC is.  PC cannot be some souped up hardware that only a few people are running.  Does it run on my PC?  No.  So if I include all hardware add-ons that I have made to my Amiga, it still should be comparable to any arbitrary PC right?  Let's be more consistent.  If you PC is not backward compatible with most of old software, it's NOT a PC.  It's just a NEW computer.

[amigaksi]

karlos: that would never happen though, as it would require them to open their eyes, remove the fingers from their ears and stop humming.

Here's an example of a blind side-kick.  Just following someone blindly does not help you--  only misleads people.

[amigaksi]

Well, not really. I am reworking said example code into a charged particle simulation where each particle has a charge and mass. The force calculation then will be the Coulomb attraction between them. Unlike gravity, this force can be repulsive.

Also, the calculation is a bit more complex as I need one which has a maximum force potential at a distance equal to the sum of the radii of a pair of particles that becomes strongly repulsive at any distance less than that, regardless of the force potential (repulsive or attractive) at a distance greater than that.

I'm interested to see if such simulated charged particles of a given sets of mass, size and charge auto arrange in the way that ionic lattices do.

Why not try it out on a REAL PC with standard hardware rather than specialized graphics cards.

[amigaksi]

Well, as a user of AROS, Windows XP/Vista, OSX, I have to wonder sometimes what Windows and OSX are doing sometimes.

You guys can laugh at that guy and make jokes all you want, but I think most everybody has the same experience on Windows/MacOS sometimes.  The experience where by you don't really have any of 'your' apps open, other than standard stuff running in the background, and you go to launch an app and while it's loading 'for whatever reason' the computer slows down.  Or you are just browsing the web and you go to launch another app and in Windows you go to the Start button, but it won't click, screens "freeze" i.e. where the shape of the windows is there, but the image is a partial of the last window that was behind/infront of it.  

I use Maya on OSX and while Maya is a fairly large program I often have to wait a "while" for firefox to start when I'm not even doing anything in Maya.


There's no argument,  I mean I've been around computers a few days.  Everyone experiences, certainly in Windows case, the randomness of the computer slowing/freezing for a few seconds when you are seemingly doing nothing.  

It obviously not that hardware.  I kind doubt it just sort of bottle necks it self for 10 seconds every now and then.  ;-)

They are only laughing at themselves once they realize they didn't even understand the point nor reply to the entire message.  It's the hardware and the OS-- both.  The hardware has its limitations maintaining backward compatibility so slow-downs occur.  The OS obviously has it's limitations as far as real-time events go.

[amigaksi]

The only time I've had total freezes on this machine is when I've done something really stupid, like attempting to launch 1,000,000 GPU threads simultaneously, just to see what happens. It completely maxed out the hardware.

X has locked up twice, both times due to a conflict between CUDA and Compiz. Easy to fix, ssh into the box and kill the X server.

The point is, the assertion in this thread that the "PC", as a platform  is playing catch up to the amiga is only true in the vivid imagination of a few Amiga fans that can't comprehend the difference between the PC and the OS that runs on it.

I have an A1, with an 800MHz G4, AGP Radeon 7000 gfx etc. It totally outclasses my classic A1200T in every way imaginable (except that the A1200 currently has more RAM installed ). However, aside from the CPU, it's made entirely out of standard "PC" hardware. And bloody old PC hardware at that.

My "PC", is about 1 year old and was fairly bleeding edge when I built it. In terms of hardware, it outclasses my A1 by an equally obscene amount. It's a hardware box. Windows doesn't come into it, since I run a 64-bit native linux as my main OS anyway.

However, Vista is installed on the machine and, as much as you'll all want to disagree, it flies like sh!t of a shovel. Which is just as well, since I only have it for gaming. You simply cannot play Crysis or Fallout 3 at 1680x1050 with all details turned up to maximum, having it run liquid smooth for several hours of solid gaming and then conclude "its slow and stops responding every now and then".

Talk about Chewbacca defense.  I gave you a much simpler example-- 1Khz reading of joystick port (that works on all PCs).  You are replying with your own example unrelated to what was asked.  All I have to do is show one example, where Amiga wins out and your claims above are FALSE and the topic of this thread is valid-- PC still playing catchup.  So please answer the post else don't pretend that you did.

[amigaksi]

Neither Linux or AmigaOS are realtime OS's and damn well you know it. Claiming one is more "realtime" than another is a bit misleading. A realtime kernel guarantees that an event requiring service will receive it within a specified time limit. No commonly used desktop OS makes this guarantee.

...
Under linux, I've been able to use machines where the load average was over 100.

Depends on the task.  If your real-time task only involves modifying some registers, you can use the Copper and it's guaranteed with accuracy of 558ns (no +/- latency bullcrap).

And we can talk Amiga vs. PC w/o dealing with OSes although with PCs you'll have a hard time finding modern PCs that even maintain compatibility at hardware level.

[amigaksi]

You're right. Joystick polling is a much better test of computational power than a particle physics simulation.

First read everything written before you blurt out something against someone.  Joystick reading at 1Khz is also a real-time event.  Amigas were built with better gaming interface than PCs so that's a strength of the Amiga.  PCs already had more computational power even while Amiga was being marketed.  The claim that PCs have already surpassed Amiga in every aspect or by obscene amount is FALSE and I only need to state one example.   There are other examples, but people are having a hard time grasping that even because they are blinded by the aura of modern PCs and can't see anything beyond Gigahertz processor speed.

His physics simulation is NO example of general PC power either.  It's specific to his set-up.  The examples I gave work on ALL amigas.  I can read joystick at 15Khz easily on any Amiga.  I wanted to see what the answer was for 1Khz.  I can do copper list real-time events on ALL amigas.   Perhaps, you should buy some souped up PCI graphics video card and put it in an Amiga and do the physics simulation and add in a few more hardware add-ons while you are at it and then do the comparison.

[amigaksi]

Well, AmigaOS generally tasks run for at least an exec quantum of time before being preemptively switched out. However, as Trev says, all kinds of other things can happen in unpredictable ways.

AmigaOS is most assuredly not a RTOS, however it is so damned efficient that for the most part it behaves as if it were one. Right up until it hits heavy CPU load.

But Amiga hardware supports real-time systems better than modern PCs.  Who cares about OS when OS easily allows you to take over the machine and use cycle-exact coding unlike modern OSes which are bloated and hardly anyone knows what's happening internally.

[amigaksi]

Also, the argument was about "real-time OS", not what constitutes a real-time task in general. AmigaOS and Linux are in no way, shape or form "real-time" OS. You should probably look up the definition of what constitutes a real-time OS if you think differently.

A real-time OS guarantees that an event (an interrupt ot whatever) shall be dealt within a specified minimum time limit. A failure to do so is considered a complete failure of the OS.

No commonly used desktop OS makes this guarantee. You'll only see it in embedded hardware and mission critical systems.

Read what I wrote-- it depends on what you are doing.  Each real-time system has it's time constraints-- if you know the worse case time the OS takes (which is easier to figure out on Amiga than modern OSes), you can design a real-time system with OS.  Other option you have on the Amiga is that you can bypass the Amiga OS.  The fact that you have hardware support guaranteeing that you can trigger off IRQ or do regster modifications with accuracy of 558ns helps with real-time tasks regardless of whether OS supports it or not.

[amigaksi]

Then please do. I'm genuinely intrigued as to what this one example could be. And once you deliver it, I suppose you could look at it the other way around. I would suggest the amiga has been playing catchup to the PC for some time now. Or at least it would be, if it was even in the race still. Which it isn't and it hasn't been since the last hardware amiga rolled off the production line.
...

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.

[amigaksi]

First of all, it is a "real PC". The graphics card is no more out of place in this machine than any of the custom chips in my "real Amigas". This simulation runs on any PC that has a G80 or above based graphics card.

Secondly, there's nothing "specialised" whatsoever about the card. All current generation graphics cards tend to have fully programmable parallel arithmetic units.

Thirdly, I have run the same simulation entirely on the CPU. A naive single threaded implementation in the same "real PC" is about 250x slower than the GPU version on this machine. I can boost it significantly by optimizing it for four core execution and even further by using specific SSE3 vector operations. However, that naive version would still be 400x faster than my humble 040 could manage in a perfect world where memory bandwidth was infinite and all operations took one cycle. In the actual real world, it couldn't run it at all, there's not enough memory available to even hold the state information for this simulation.

Criticising the use of the GPU is also shooting your own argument for the Amiga in the foot. So far, you've extolled the virtue of using the custom chips for "realtime" performance, such as polling the joyport. If our experiment were simply filling flatshaded polygons on a 68000 amiga, would you be advocating the use of the CPU and not some "specialised graphics processor" ? Of course not.
...

My point is not that current graphics cards are NOT superior to Amiga graphics overall, but one of standards.  Unless your application runs on all the other graphics cards, it's of no use to me since I can build a custom PC w/souped up hardware that excels all other PCs but any software taking advantage of such hardware would only run on my PC.  Amigas custom chips are in every Amiga.  I have dealt with many different graphics cards installed in various people's homes and they range from doing 15MB/second to 200MB/second data transfers so if I wrote some application I can't just assume they have 200MB/second.

>Incidentally, do you really think a 2.6GHz CPU with 12MB of cache, even running the least optimized code in existence, isn't capable of polling a piece of hardware at 1kHz without missing a single iteration?

This is your shallow understanding of PC architecture.  I/O is not caches.  I/O has it's own clock way slower than processor clock.  In fact, even the memory doesn't even run at the processor clock and I/O to hardware is much slower than memory.  Only specialized AGP type buses can access memory mapped areas faster than I/O transfers but even in those cases their control ports for I/O are still slower than regular memory access.

[amigaksi]

That's an entirely arbitrary statement. My PC boots MS-DOS in less than one second (after POST, which takes a bit longer--system firmware is quite complex these days, with more features than your average Amiga). That's much faster than any of my Amigas. Is it a useful measurement? No, because there's no direct correlation between the two systems, and ...

... here's where someone argues that no one uses MS-DOS. Well, no one uses AmigaOS, either. I'd wager there are more active MS-DOS users (millions, even) than there are active AmigaOS users. If you don't believe me, then you don't spend enough time in front of embedded systems.

Everyone really does need to straighten out their definitions of real-time. Karlos is talking computer science, everyone else is talking user perception. There is no "real-time" in user perception. Humans are neat, but we have lots of built-in latency. Milliseconds have passed before I know I've pricked my finger, for example.

Personally, I can do more useful work in a shorter amount of time on my Windows system (Core i7 920, 6GB RAM, GeForce 8800 GTS 512 (G92), blah blah blah). The Amigas are just for fun.

I use MSDOS still and I can state that Amiga boots up faster since it needs to load a 1024 byte boot block to be ready to accept commands.  It's main functions in ROM.  MSDOS on the other hand reads a boot block followed by the OS functions (MSDOS.SYS/IO.SYS/COMMAND.COM/etc.) before you can actually use the OS functions.  Actually Atari/C64 with cartridge based software boot up with software faster than both.  Boot-up time is useful in some cases where you just want to try testing some stuff.  I still use Atari 800 for testing external devices connected to joystick ports with simple PEEK/POKE 54016.  

Also useful for doing some simple math.  Don't we still use calculators because they boot up faster than booting up a PC although you can get the functionality of the calculator in a laptop/desktop.  I find Atari/Amigas retro-machines easy to analyze for video/real-time stuff and fun for games since their code is highly efficient and optimized and perfectly synched up to video rates.  And you know you are the only thing running and there won't be any viruses or any Wifi doing background bullcrap.