68k AGA AROS + UAE => winner!

[Karlos]

@Hammer

It totally depends on what your transisters are used for :-D

How much of the modern x86 die is given up to x86 -> micro op decode, how much is given up to crutchhing up the "classic" x86 support?

How much of hte 970 transistor count is needed for legacy support? Virtually nothing.

Incidentally, I'm not the one who started the PPC v Intel debate here ;-)

Anyway, my point here is that the core of modern x86 processors is comparable to modern day RISC, hence the old "CISC v RISC" arguments are largely irrelavent in modern designs. Your PPC v AMD comparison makes that even more evident.

Note that Alpha sports an EV6 bus advantage, why try it with EV6 bus enabled K7 Athlons?

Dude, this was around start 1997. I should have made that clear - it's been a while since I was at Uni, you see. There were no Athlons and I'm not sure what sort of bus the Alpha was using then. But, it completely stuffed the new P2 systems that came to "replace it", which was rather amusing.

@whoosh777

I agree, the fastest consumer processors are x86 currently. That doesn't mean they are achitectually superior - as I say, they use many RISC paragdims in their cores to acheive the performance they reach. There is absolutely *no way* a conventional "classic x86" core, soley depending upon the 486 register set could get this far. The chip designers realised this a decade ago when the first "many register load/store" processors were crucifying them performance wise :-D

However, the x86 was already massively popular. They are the most competitively developed processors because the market is so ripe. Now it is dominated by Intel and AMD. A decade ago, there were many rivals.

Anyway, the point is, the "large register count / RISC is better view" has been largely proven. As I said, internally, x86 manufacturers moved their cores this way quite some time ago. What would have been truly interesting is to see what their cores would be like if they were packaged as a pure RISC processor, without all the x86 decode. For example, the P2 core has something like 64 (or maybe 128, I don't remeber) registers used for rename and shadowing.

[Karlos]

Hammer wrote:
A few rhetorical questions;

1. What was the clock speed of that particlar DEC Alpha at 1997 against the Pentium Pro?

I already said. The alpha system there was a single processor set up at 266MHz. The Pentium-II machines brought in as 'upgrades' were 350MHz.

2. What was the price differential between the two?

Not entirely sure. Both systems were expensive, using SCSI, custom designed cards etc., but the alpha had been kicking around in the lab for several years already. The Pentium-II machines were brought in to replace it for 2 reasons:

1) Future versions of the software for which the machine was used were to be for x86 only, a move to sell it to a potentially larger audience (no doubt), so a shift to x86 was unavoidable. It was decided to make the shift early to lessen the upgrade hassles later.

2) The Pentium-II 350 machines brought in were expected to outclass the older Alpha @ 266.

Embarassingly for the senior IT technician who ordered the changes, the newer machines ran the existing x86 version of the software not only slower than the Alpha, they ran it at a speed that was only marginally greater than running the x86 version under FX32 on the alpha.

Pity they ain't still making them :-(

[Karlos]

@bloodline

Actually, the normal human eye can differentiate several million shades. Even with my colour blindess I can see that undithered 16-bit images are visibly considerably lower quality than 8-bits per gun. Many display cards often use 10-bit resolution (or higher) per gun for their DACs.

However, if you use dithering on 16-bit image data (when reducing down from 24/32-bit), the quality is dramatically improved.

@whoosh777

As bloodline says, HAM8 is slow as hell. It's only tha amiga's unique hardware arrangements that makes it even remotely feasable as a display mode at all. Even then its really only useful for showing still images (including frames of animation). It's not especially useful at all for 'realtime' imagery as generated by GUI's etc. Trust me, there's nothing it can visually do that can't be outclassed by a genuine 32-bit display running even on a fairly low end card.

[Karlos]

@Hammer

I have no idea about the bytmark benchmarks but they aren't relavent to the point I was making. All I can tell you is the software in question was for spectra prediction and molecular energy calculations. There were several different platform builds available at the time, but it was stated that future versions would be x86 only. The existing x86/NT version ran very poorly on the real Pentium-II compared to the same revision for Alpha, which managed to run same the x86 version around 80% of the speed at which the Pentium-II did. The Alpha native version on alpha comared to the x86 version on Pentuiu-II was about 2x faster. That's all I can tell you.

It seems to me in hindsight that the x86 build of that version of the application must have been very poor.

Hell, I didn't write the stupid thing, I just had to use it.

[Karlos]

@Hammer

Interesting. The Alpha machine was there in 1995 and wasn't new then. I'm reasonably sure it was a 21164. When was it released?

[Karlos]

@whoosh777

So anyway, how's the big-endian memory emulation idea progressing? Somewhere in the chip / trackdisk / aros install posts I lost where you were up to.

Are you still planning to attempt it?