PC still playing Amiga catchup

[Karlos]

@Linde

I don't think he's entirely serious there. This is a good old "which platform is better" war, like we all used to enjoy back in the late 80's early 90's.

Anybody that takes anything in this thread too seriously, really needs professional help

[Karlos]

I may be missing a hint here, but having read the forum for a few years, I'm not so sure that I share your optimism

Almost everybody here has an interest in Amigas. Most of us have owned one or more and many of us still do. However, the majority of us also own other systems too.

Back in the day, I used to hate PC's, Ataris, Macs and pretty much anything that wasn't an Amiga.

Nowadays, I just hate Macs

Seriously though, current generation machines are tools that I use for serious work, high definition gaming and media. I use my Amigas for fun, doing all kinds of ultimately pointless things with them simply because they can be done. I'm not under any illusion that they are suddenly going to make a triumphant comeback into the world. This means I enjoy them all the more as I don't constantly brood over the lack of progress the platform is making. Finally, even though I would sooner spit on one at the time, I'd even have an Atari

[Karlos]

@amigaski

You replied to the same message twice; but anyway, my answer is the same as well-- you need to understand what a PC is. I am a low-level programmer; I hardly use the OS for anything. Whatever software I write is what is potentially possible with the PC

As I said in the same post you have just failed to comprehend before replying to, if you don't use the OS and bang the hardware, then WTF is stopping you using the CPU for precision timing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Stamp_Counter

Turn off clockspeed altering power saving modes or use the constant TSC if present. Create an asm function for timing. Lock your code to one core (on multicore) and write a busy loop with a suitable instruction to prevent OOO execution and count the bloody ticks until you hit the magic number you've determined based on the reported frequency of your TSC.

Quit your moaning about 850ns resolution hardware clocks. If you are a low level coder then the above tick timer should prove no problem. It should work on pretty much anything since the pentium.

Or, if all that is too much of a PITA, you could, assuming you have a reasonably recent PC, just use HPET

[Karlos]

By the way, Atari 800 joysticks read two joystick ports with one LDA instruction (LDA 54016) and takes 4 cycles at 1.78979Mhz.  It beats any USB/Game Port joystick out there.

My question here is, who other than yourself actually cares about how fast they can read the joyport? This is one thing about your argument I really don't quite understand.

What is it you are doing that requires you to poll the joyport on a precision interval? Are you using some sort of homebrew measuring device on it?

[Karlos]

Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps

At full HD 1080p

, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available.  I just saw a "hello world" example on modern OSes give an executable output of 1 MB since it was linked and tied to some multi-function crap (MFC).

Strange, hello world compiles to <5 K here, and that's with all the debugging crap left in.

[Karlos]

@stefcep2

The thing is, I stop reading when I get to "Vista", "XP" or anything else on your list of "it's so slow compared to the resources available." Windows is a heavyweight OS that basically tries to start everything and the kitchen sink at boot time. You can tune it if you want and it improves.

However, the catch is, I don't use Windows. I don't use PC's and Windows interchangably like some on the thread have done when they want to highlight what they consider as deficiencies on the PC. They aren't. They are defiencies in Windows and/or it's configuration. Take Windows out of the equation, shove a better OS - of which there are many to choose from - and you can see the raw speed of the machine.

Somebody earlier all but called me a liar for saying firefox 3 starts "instantly" on this machine. I actually took 0.14 seconds, so yeah, I guess I exaggerated. Under Vista, on the same physical box it took about 5 seconds to launch. Clearly the OS performance is a huge factor when it comes to the end user experience.

Seems to me like most "PC" critics here only have experience of one or more flavours of Windows.

Try a different operating system

[Karlos]

Well the term "PC" is now a generic one meaning x86 hardware with a Microsoft OS.  That would be true in more than 95% of cases when someone says "PC".  No-one says "Mac PC's" and how many even say "Linux PC's" ( personally "Linux box" is what I know it as).  

I totally disagree.

A "Linux Box" where I come from means a box running linux. That can mean anything from a ARM powered Gumstix to a PS3 console, let alone commodity PC's and laptops. People say "Macs", because they've always said it. PowerPC based Macs were called "PowerMacs" for a while to differentiate them from their 68K predecessors. When Apple moved to intel lots of people started using the phrase "intel Mac", though it hasn't really caught on.

If the term PC can be nailed to any one thing it's a hardware x86/AMD64 CPU based computer. PC's have always been able to run more than one operating system.

If anything, I tend to call a PC running WIndows a "windows box". The days when windows ran on non x86/AMD64 cpus are long gone.

[Karlos]

No its Vista, the current OS running on current hardware( 2 months old). But I'm sure in 5 years time Vista will fly on that hardware.

Something has to be wrong there.

My machine is nearly a year old now. Admittedly it was pretty high-spec when I built it but I wanted something that was going to last a while.

intel Q9450 @ 2.66 GHz
intel X48 chipset
4GB DDR3 1600 (running at 1333 but with 7-7-7 latency)
500GB Seagate HDD
XFX GTX260 640MHz version


As I said earlier, I do use Vista (64-bit home premium ed) whenever I want to indulge in a spot of gaming. Admittedly, it's not as responsive as Linux, but I couldn't possibly describe it as slow, not by any stretch of the imagination.

[Karlos]

And no I've done Linux, its multitasking is worse than Windows and definatley worse than Amiga.

Now I know you are having a giraffe. What was it, a version 1 kernel on a 486?

[Karlos]

FFS Karlos!!!!  Look at your specs.  You don't have a garden variety PC there.  It runs Vista ok?  No kidding!!  Keep throwing a gazillion CPU's and gigabytes of super fast RAM, ANYTHING will fly.  Thats the point.

I didn't suggest it was a garden variety, merely recent. Less recent than yours, too. Ironically it cost about the same to build as the A1. Less if you factor in inflation :-o

What do you regard as a "garden variety" specification PC anyway?

I've used also Vista 32-bit with no problem on a 1.86 GHz core 2 duo, 2GB with 128MB Radeon X300. It was still perfectly snappy.

[Karlos]

I think the memory standard guys missed a trick here. They could have made it 1337.:lol:

I have been itching to try it at 6-6-6, just to see what happens...

[Karlos]

I set my memory timing to something stupidly low (especially given the cheapness of my RAM modules).. the machine just got stuck into a reset cycle... I had to reset the BIOS to restore.

My motherboard has "dual bios", so that shouldn't be a problem. You can roll back any destructive change.

[Karlos]

I don't think it will even break a sweat TBH. But why the DEVIL would you want to do that?:hammer:

Well, Diablo III is coming out soon...

[Karlos]

@Karlos

Set your RAM:FSB ratio to 1:1 and then you'll be able to get some uber low latencies :cool:

It is. The FSB is 1333. If I ever overclock, I have some headroom in the RAM.

[Karlos]

Amiga joystick ports are superior to PCs.  Amiga boots up faster.  And a few more things will be mentioned...

Re: Joyport / Parallel port. Current PC's don't have either port to compare against. Your inability to use your "low level" coding skills to write an accurate timer for x86/HPET is no reflection on the hardware..

Re: bootup times:

From cold, timed this morning:

My A1200T (25MHz 68040, 240MHz 603e, 256MB 60ns RAM, BVisionPPC)

SCSI check: 10sec
Floppy check: 2sec
Initial startup, 3.9 ROM loading: 4 sec
Reboot pause: 3 sec
SCSI check: 10sec
Floppy check: 2sec
Startup: 26 sec
End of WBStartup activity: 5 sec

Grand total: 62 sec

PC:
POST Test: 5sec
DPMI Verification: 3 sec
GRUB wait for user select: 10 sec
Linux Kernel decompression&initialisation: 1 sec
Startup to login screen: 22 sec
End of post login window manager activity: 3 sec

Grand total: 44 sec

Waiting for stuff occupies the lion's share of both. Suffice to say, no matter how fast a CPU is, they all wait at the same speed...

Or teach.

Or talk bollox.

[Karlos]

I'll post the A1 boot time when I have a moment, right now I need to get ready for work. I suspect it'll be the fastest of all of them.