Teaser: Another purchase made, more NOS equipment on the way!

[Damion]

I want to see a warehouse filled with A3000+'s personally.

It would be pretty difficult to find a warehouse
full, since they only made 50...

[Damion]

IRC there was nothing special about them except the FF and SCSI onboard.
Of course it's a rarity and has value because of that, but technicallywise it's the same as an A4000.

Actually they didn't even have the FF...the only
cool things about them were the SCSI and the
programmable DSP, but even if the DSP worked
there's no software (or documentation?) for it.
Cool for collectors, but "IMO" an original
Commodore 4000T would be a better find.

[Damion]

-edit-
Hmmmmm...don't think so. The "planned" DSP (did
it even work?) was mainly for 16 bit audio
capability, and besides it was only a 50mhz
chip; there's no way it would have provided
P3 800mhz performance even with 10 of them.
Still cool machines though, don't get me wrong!:)

Softhut was selling a few of them a while
back, they may still have one if anyone's
interested.
 

[Damion]

@Downix

I'm afraid you're mistaken; let's look at some
figures from the Sandra benchmarking utility:

Intel PII @450mhz   1220 MIPS   590 MFLOPS
AMD K6-2 @400mhz    1165 MIPS   475 MFLOPS
Intel PI @266mhz     630 MIPS   300 MFLOPS

And a few Pentium 3 benchmarks:

Intel PIII @500mhz  1350 MIPS   670 MFLOPS
Intel PIII @750mhz  2012 MIPS   998 MFLOPS

Oh and what the hell,

68060/60 @66mhz       86 MIPS    34 MFLOPS

Yes I'm well aware that the DSP in the A3000+
was also to be used for some maths processing,
but let's be realistic, the '030 and the DSP
combined wouldn't have equalled the FPU
performance of a P266, and once we factor
integer performance (MIPS) it's really in for
a beating.

Then we have to consider other things such as
bus, memory speed and graphics performance,
and I'm sorry but in every respect your average
PIII had the 3000+ beaten by a considerable
margin.

So looks like I am right here.

Please check the number(s), and try your call
again later.

[Damion]

All of the processors listed have full 32bit
architectures (branch, integer and floating
point) and I assume have been measured as such.

[Damion]

Well to be sure I'll doublecheck the sources and
post back later today.

[Damion]

@Downix

Well I certainly did find some interesting info on this
subject. Check out this link:

http://www-it.desy.de/systems/linux/meetings/22ndLUM_Benchmarks.pdf

Of notable interest to us is page 4, under the heading "Dirac
Operator Benchmark", which rates a P4 @1.4ghz as capable
of achieving 1503 MFLOPS while performing 32-bit maths;
814 computing 64-bit maths (under this particular test).

Now this is entirely consistant with my earlier benchmark,
rating the P3 @750mhz as capable of processing 998
MFLOPS - considering that clock - for - clock, there is
very little difference between the P3 and P4 (some tests
even rate the P3 as being "faster" processing certain tasks
at the same clockspeed).

We also have to realize that MFLOPS is an entirely subjective
rating to begin with - are we measuring float multiplication,
division, linear (static) float or perhaps interleaved (piped)
float? And consider that the increased superscalar nature of
modern chips means that they can process much more
information per clock cycle than those old chips ever could;
note the radical difference between the 68040 and 68060
when performing certain operations due to the 68060's (quite
basic) super-scalar abilities. This site seems an accurate
fundamental description of MIPS and MFLOP ratings:

http://futuretech.mirror.vuurwerk.net/perf.html

Another interesting factor from the above (first) link is the
difference between the P4 MFLOPS rating when comparing
the 32 and 64-bit maths tests...the difference is almost linear!
Applying this same logic to our 750mhz P3, we can see that
even if the MFLOPS rating of 998 was achieved while
calculating 8 or 16-bit functions (unlikely), the P3 would still
be considerably faster...and in some respects the jury is
still out on this one, as the particular design of the "32-bit"
CPU will largely influence how well it may calculate
8 or 16-bit maths.

And now we haven't even addressed the issue of memory
bandwidth or "graphics" performance, which surely
would have put the (already) challenged 3000+ at an even
larger disadvantage paired against our P3. Also, in the
end, we have to think about 'real world' factors: How would
the 3000+ compare to our PIII in the theoretical game of
Q2?

-edit-

Check out this cool site for some more accurate benchmarks
on the PII @450mhz:

http://n0cgi.distributed.net/speed/