PC still playing Amiga catchup

[AmigaHeretic]

GPU Gems article here (pdf)

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.  ;-)

But I've never seen any explanation for it.  


Sort of off topic, it's funny how we have delay built into things and we don't even realize it.  For example I got a new stereo for my car a month or so ago.  A Sony, nothing fancy, just a CD unit, plays MP3 discs, etc.   The tuner has 6 buttons for Radio presets, pretty standard.  But what is strange is when you hit the button, the next station plays instantly.  No 1/2 second silence then the next station.  It's just, push the button and there the next channel.  Kind of interesting, I never really thought about it.  Car stereo in our other car, home receiver, etc, all have a slight delay.

[AmigaHeretic]

But a computer runnings Windows is a PC right?  So...

Or maybe it's an "iPC", imPersonal Computer?

[AmigaHeretic]

I throw my opine in here I guess....


Amiga is light years behind the PC.  We don't need to go into all the crazy awesome hardware you can get on a PC.


There are something that Windows hasn't caught up to though. (feel free to compare these to Mac/Linux on the same hardware)

-Single directory App installations.  i.e. no Registry.  Windows needs to find a better way to do things.  Windows is a pain the ass to deal with a lot of times when an 'app goes bad' and needs to be repaired.    Now, you can lay some blame on the app developers, but Windows default model is messy.

-OS Windows/System32 file structure is a mess.  Most all virus/spyware you find out there just puts files in /Windows/ or Windows/System32.  You'd think viruses would be easy to remove, but there is so much crap everywhere that literally people make a living just by telling what is suppose to be in System32 and what isn't.

-There still some Amiga GUI type things Windows lacks.  Such as window focus.  In Windows as soon as you click a Window it is forced to the front.  Would like to at least have more control or things like that, ala double 'click to front'.

-Boot times.  Yeah, sore subject these days I guess.  But seriously it a sad joke.  I leave my computer on 24/7 because it's a SO slow to startup.  Sometimes if the OS becomes a little flaky I just leave until a point I am doing something else so I can restart it as shut down & boot up is even more of a joke.  

SATA2 is rated a 6gb/sec- computers have tons ram - multi cores and multi GHZ, there is no excuse for it.  The "well" Windows has your ethernet are ready to go by the time the Start button appears at least, that argument just doesn't cut it anymore.

My computer is an appliance to me.  I don't leave my TV on 24/7 because it's a pain in the ass to wait for it to turn on.  If my light bulbs took so long to turn on I'd leave my lights on all the time too.  


Anyway, it's hard to just say, blanket statement, that todays OSes are flawed, but there is room today for a "fast" single user OS, where I can copy a program by moving a folder, or delete a program for that matter by dragging the folder to the trash.


Anyway....

[AmigaHeretic]

My 800MHz G4 A1XE takes around half the time of my A1200T to boot. It has 32x the CPU speed, 5x the bus speed, 10x the sustainable hard disk transfer rate, yada etc.

It's running AmigaOS so on that hardware, surely it should boot in a flat second. Dear me, whatever could be wrong with it?

Boot times are not a metric for computer performance. Boot times are dominated by waiting, be it waiting for initialisation of hardware, software, synchronisation between processes or a myriad of other things. The more processes that are started, the more conflated this becomes.

All computers wait at exactly the same speed. Even a factor of a million CPU clockspeed difference cannot make a half second device initialisation go any faster. a 4GHz CPU cannot negotiate an IP address with your router any quicker than the router wants to talk to it.

The only valid indication of performance of a system is once it has booted up, not how long it takes to get there. My A1200* has a longish from cold boot time for an Amiga classic, but once up, it's pretty quick and capable, much moreso than a 7 second boot-from-cold bare OS3.1 install.

*FYI an accelerator card and graphics card as the sole internal expansion cards in a system do not make it a Frankenstein machine.

I don't really think it has anything to do with driver initalization though.  There are plenty of examples of OSes that can boot in a few seconds, have sound, ethernet ready, etc etc.  People in this very thread claim to have boot times in the "seconds" range, so I really don't think it is an issue of hardware/hardware initialization... That is unless it the slow way Windows does it guess.

Boot times aren't a metric of CPU performance, but it is a metric of "performance".   If I had two identical computers boxes next to me and the 'only' difference was one booted in 10 seconds and one booted in a minute, then you'd obviously buy the 10 second box. (Assuming all other things equal).  So yes, the performance of how fast a system boots is a metric.  Now it's not the main metric I would ever look at when buying a computer, but it's almost 2010, I dare say it seems odd.

[AmigaHeretic]

You use your audio card as a joystick?

I can use my sound card as a joystick port. Does that count?

[AmigaHeretic]

Have you seen typical driver sets for things like graphics cards these days?

Thanks to direct support for CUDA, PhysX, OpenGL1.0 - 3.0, Direct X (up to v10), Pure Video etc, the drivers for my card alone weigh in at around 100 MB, not including tweaking tools.

The linux drivers aren't much smaller.

I don't really think that has anything to do with initalisation though.  With drivers your really are getting back to HD speed and CPU speed. Besides even it took a full second to initalize the card, with the Quad core beast, blazing fast bus speeds, and HD speeds you should be able to initialize just about everything at the same time.  Aside from the fact that many people, as some have pointed our here, this is possible.   Something QNX or Amithlon, take seconds to boot and you can access the internet, hear sound, see the desktop.


For Windows, there's also the speed that "some" apps install.  Or some Windows updates.  Windows update can take minutes just to figure out what needs to be updated.   I can render huge 3D scenes in Maya in less time.  What in the world could Windows be doing in all that time?

[AmigaHeretic]

So why might that not happen?  karlos?

It does happen on 'some' OSes. ;-)  Why not others?