Is there any use for a PPC with just classic AmigaOS?

[Piru]

@AmigaMance

i'm not mentioning anything about context-switching. Hummpa did.

Well, that's quite obvious. What I am wondering is why you quoted him while he was talking about something else.

Anyway, at least while I was still using my A1200, most WOS apps were clearly faster under MOS. Much of that was due to fully PPC native CGX and other OS components vs slower 68K counterparts under AOS. And this was with 060 BPPC, even.

However, if you have some WOS app that deliberately tries to avoid context swithces, it can then happen that it is marginally faster under AOS 3.x (since under AOS the PPC chip is 100% free for the app, while under MOS it also runs other parts of the OS). Regardless, I'm confident in claiming that MOS WOS emu beats the original in most cases, and it's less buggy, too... ;-)

[CLS2086]

The master Piru has spoken  ;-) .

The only good point for AOS3.x it's the custom OCS/ECS/AGA chip use.

[Karlos]

Well-written OS3.x/WarpOS (or PowerUP) software is not context switch heavy, so the whole context switch overhead issue ought to be largely irrelavent.

A PPC with OS3.x gives a much needed boost to a lot of computationally intensive operations, such as datatype decoding, image dithering (3.9 picture.datatype), mp3 playback and of course any games written to take advantage of it.

With MOS installed, you get to run your 68K/RTG apps faster than the real 680x0 could manage (especially the 040).

Overall, I'd say, yes, there is a point. Using the second 1200T here that has an 040+mediator, the difference provided by the PPC for the common tasks (datatype stuff) is readily apparent.