How fast is "fast enough"

[sandpiper]

@melott

I have a WarpEngine 040 @ 40 mhz running OS 3.9in my A3000 and it does all I want it to just fine.

I agree. I have the same setup. Although when you use apps such as IBrowse & Yam they are a little sluggish. Performance difference with these and other apps is quite noticeable in my other machine which has an '060. '060 is much snappier. For me, an '040 equipped machine would be the minimum standard.

[persia]

Core, I gotta have lot's of 'em.  The more cores the better.  

[Tenacious]

I jumped to 68060 to play Mp3s through Paula and it still was lacking. Paula can do 14 bit audio, max.   When I finally found a MasPlayer, the 060 was inconsequential (I still like it, though).

The Amiga was designed around co-processing.  If you can run retargetable graphics and audio through improved hardware, then an 030 is very usable and the most compatible.

[stefcep2]

I don't necessarily see it as a CPU speed problem.
I see what the programmers did on the old C=64 with a
1 mhz 6502 processor and what they are doing on a 2 gig PC.
As I see it, its the programmers that have gotten LAZY.
They don't optimize their code for speed, if it works its
good enough (the processor will take care of speed).

Mel

Thats it in a nutshell.  In the semester of computer science I took at University, we managed to cut down the search time from 4 minutes to 2 and a half in a database we were writing in Pascal on a B and W Mac just by optimizing our search routines and code structure.  

Currently we have ludicrous situation where we need quad-core multi ghz cpu's in PC's to multitask properly.  

I remember going from a 40 mHz 68030 to 40 mhz 68040 to a 50 mhz 68060 and at each step there was huge difference in performance for all tasks.  Imagine, I thought, what i could do with clock speeds in the hundreds of mHZ?  Now days you go from  1000 mhz to 2000  mhz and you think "Oh boot up time is the same, I can do a render/mp3 faster and...thats it"

[stefcep2]

Tenacious wrote:
I jumped to 68060 to play Mp3s through Paula and it still was lacking. Paula can do 14 bit audio, max.   .

Really?  I can play back all mp3's on an 40 mhz 68040 A1200 in a dblscan screen at 48 khz 14-bit paula sound without skipping  with 40% cpu usage and they sound great too.  I use a small arexx script which opens a file requestor to select the mp3 I want and it leaves a small cli window open.  I run executive, so that i can happily multitask at the same time.

[clemenza]

A 030/50MHz is quite sufficient for me, as it can play the majority of Amiga games through WHDload and, of course, Doom! In case I need more CPU power I'll turn to a 40MHz 68040 as I haven't found anything that could run on my 50MHz 68060 and couldn't run on my 40MHz 68040! So, pricewise I'd say the 68040. These days I'm using mostly my 68000 A500+ and my 25MHz 68030 A2000 so I've got the feeling that anything above the 68030 can be tooooooo fast! :-D

[klx300r]

A6000 wrote:

And I bet a vanilla A1200 with HD can boot the OS and load applications quicker.

hows 6 seconds to boot my 1200 with 030@50 compared to bloody 5 minutes for my P4-2 Ghz HP notebook :lol:

[Tenacious]

@ stefcep2

Thats pretty good!  It seems others have posted questions to get the same results with 68040s.

Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased that Amigas can play Mp3s.  I'm simply impressed with the MasPlayer.  They are available again, have excellent quality, low CPU usage, work with popular software, are reasonably priced.

[Varthall]

I won't go below my 1GHz G4. It suits my needs for the moment, but e.g. with the latest version of Milkytracker, some of the available resamplers even require a faster CPU.

Varthall