WinUAE speed changes!

[Damion]

Those are definately good points...but personally I don't think this has anything to do with the processor,, I seriously doubt WinUAE uses SSE2, in fact a 1.8 GHz Barton "should" (setup properly) stomp a 2.0 GHz Celeron at WinUAE math/proc benchmarks.  

And it certainly could be a background task conflicting with things...myself I don't run "ANY" virus checker in the background, just update and scan with AntiVir about once a week or after I've been surfing prOn...YMMV

--edit--

Please excuse the small wrapping in some of my posts (can't seem to fix it for some reason)...my monitor tanked a few weeks back, and I'm presently stuck using a 12 year old 14" at 640x480...:-(

[JetFireDX]

One simple thing I did on my Windows XP setup to improve performance was to use a registry change to make XP aware of the Athlon 2500+'s 512k cache. Windows is by default set to use only 256k if I remember right. I dunno if the setting applies to Win2000 as well, but it is something to look into. Everything ran better once I changed this.

[bloodline]

I found WindowsXP ran WinUAE faster on my old Athlon600, than Windows2k,

[Cymric]

@JetFireDX:

And for those who wanted to know all about this little hack, visit this link. Thanks for the heads up, I'll make good use of it!

[Damion]

Cymric wrote:
@JetFireDX:

And for those who wanted to know all about this little hack, visit this link. Thanks for the heads up, I'll make good use of it!

From the link..

Note: This tweak is only useful for older processors with the cache located external to the CPU.

[umisef]

>Of course, I could be talking out my ass

You are

If the JIT is optimized for anything, then it's for AMD and/or PentiumII/III CPUs.

There are a couple of workarounds (rather than optimizations) for the Pentium range of CPUs. They (or at least the PII/PIII core) have a nasty thing called "RAT stall" which causes long delays in some circumstances, so when a Pentium is detected, some code is done in a less-obvious-but-faster-in-the-face-of-RAT-stall way.

The other special treatment has to do with the PentiumIV being the first (and only) x86 CPU which, for a certain couple of instructions, actually treats a few flags which are supposedly "undefined" after those instructions as, indeed, undefined --- as opposed to previous CPUs, which simply left them unchanged (and thus the instruction was a good way to set just the ZERO flag). Much uglier code for P4 type processors there.

What I suspect is that, probably due to the OS difference, WinUAE on one machine manages to set up a 1:1 memory mapping (enabling the JIT code to simply access memory directly), whereas on the other, it probably fails and forces memory access to be handled through table lookups, wasting quite a few cycles each time.

[SHADES]

@ all
Ok, hi people,

here's the reply..

Spec on my home PC
Sandra Specs on CPU
--start--
Generation : G7
Name : Duron M8 & Athlon MP/XP (Thoroughbred) 130nm 1.5-2.5GHz+ 1.5-1.65V
Revision/Stepping : 8 / 1 (0)
Stepping Mask : B0
Core Voltage Rating : 1.650V
Maximum Physical / Virtual Addressing : 34-bit / 32-bit
Native Page Size : 4kB

Chipset 1
Model : VIA Technologies Inc VT8366/A,VT8367 Apollo KT266/A,KT333 CPU to PCI Bridge
Bus(es) : ISA AGP PCI IMB USB FireWire/1394 i2c/SMBus
Front Side Bus Speed : 2x 136MHz (272MHz data rate)
Maximum FSB Speed / Max Memory Speed : 2x 166MHz / 2x 166MHz
Width : 64-bit
IO Queue Depth : 4 request(s)

Logical/Chipset 1 Memory Banks
Bank 0 : 256MB DDR-SDRAM 2.5-3-3-7CL 1CMD
Bank 2 : 256MB DDR-SDRAM 2.5-3-3-7CL 1CMD
Bank Interleave : 4-way
Speed : 2x 170MHz (340MHz data rate)
Multiplier : 5/4x
Width : 64-bit
Power Save Mode : No
Fixed Hole Present : No

--end--
Win 2k All updates
MSI KT3 Ultra 2 Pro
512MB DDR Memory
ATI 8500 /128 4X Graphics
AC97 Audio from VIA chipset (really noisy, but functional 5.1 Chan audio)
IBM Deskstar ATA 100 8MB buffer IDE
Latest Bios updates.

WinUAE is most certainly SLOWER on the ATHLON than the 2.0 CELERON p4 at work. I now think it's actually more than 112%.
I will compare a few Benchmarks with work tomorow on math etc using Sandra.

No virus killers or background intensive tasks are running on my system, I actually went in to task manager and made sure of that, I also turned off every unused system resource in the computer management section. it made no difference. Not that it should matter that much as I did noe of this on the XP Celeron at work and it has background tasks running all the time for network updates and it still kicks my 2400+  out to pasture.

If it is windows XP making this HUGE difference, it's one hell of an upgrade for the windows OS and I'm going to upgrade all my M$ PCs to XP. I seriously doubt that this is the case.

As for optimising code on the JIT side of things, I would think it would be easier to program optimised x86(global) instructions for JIT as opposed to writing for the P4 only.
you would know it would work on all Intel chips like Pentium 3 and below which have different execution techniques to the P4. Long Vs Short word instruction timing, needs to be done in a certain order or something like that. all changed with p4, which broke a lot of normal code. i think they call it sse2 coding or something.

[jj]

just to nitpick, no such thinh as a pentium 4 celeron, pentium 4 and celeron are different processors

[bloodline]

JJ wrote:
where as a pentium4 will kick nearly any cpu's arse at video encoding, due to long pipelines and no need for prediciton

An AMD 64 whoops its arse on games.

depending on the speeds,a pentium 4 will probably eb quicker than your athlon 2400+

My Athlon64 @2.0Ghz is faster at everything than my Pentium4 @3.06Ghz... Though I suspect the Athlon64's integrated dual channel memory controler to be the major force at play here.

[SHADES]

@ all

Ok, set Cas to 2.0 not that i expected any real differences.

Re ran AIBB benchmark
EmuTest
Slower result than a 040 CPU. NASTY

This is on my Athlon 2400

The XP celeron benchmark pulls the 040 off the screen. There's something really wrong here.

As for Celeron CPU being differnt, yes, just as the Athlon is different to the Intel. i used p4 as the spec as it's the arcitecture of the latest celerons with some serious limitations like the hyperthreading gone and less cache.
Still, the Athlon should be able to beat the pants off the celeron with out a doubt.

Benchmarks on XP celeron box tomorrow.

[bloodline]

SHADES wrote:
@ all

Ok, set Cas to 2.0 not that i expected any real differences.

Re ran AIBB benchmark
EmuTest
Slower result than a 040 CPU. NASTY

This is on my Athlon 2400

The XP celeron benchmark pulls the 040 off the screen. There's something really wrong here.

As for Celeron CPU being differnt, yes, just as the Athlon is different to the Intel. i used p4 as the spec as it's the arcitecture of the latest celerons with some serious limitations like the hyperthreading gone and less cache.
Still, the Athlon should be able to beat the pants off the celeron with out a doubt.

Benchmarks on XP celeron box tomorrow.

Then it has to be your WinUAE settings, as my old Athlon 600Mhz was flooring any real Amiga in all tests using AIBB!

[blobrana]

Yeah possibly...

i would also suspect the chipset performance.

Check out my farcical attempt   at building a computer...

[bloodline]

blobrana wrote:
Yeah possibly...

i would also suspect the chipset performance.

Check out my farcical attempt   at building a computer...

I'm a Gigabyte convert, now! The nForce4 chipset rocks.

[blobrana]

Me too...

i had so much fun building that last budget one, that i built another two using upmarket gigabyte mobos...(Gigabyte7VT600L  & Gigabyte2004 RZ)

 :-)

(i`ll soon be able to takeover the living room)

[bloodline]

blobrana wrote:
Me too...

i had so much fun building that last budget one, that i built another two using upmarket gigabyte mobos...(Gigabyte7VT600L  & Gigabyte2004 RZ)

 :-)

(i`ll soon be able to takeover the living room)

I notice on your website none of your machines have pannels on the cases... I dread to think of the EM eminating from your room!! :-o Your house probably shows up on satelite images... or maybe that's your plan :lol:

[DethKnight]

none of your machines have pannels on the cases

uh-oh....is this wrong?  :lol:
{it's the only way I have ever ran tower PCs}