My A500+ GVP A530 feels so damn slow

[Amigaz]

Haven't used my A500+ with a 40mhz GVP A530 for some time now but I set her up yesterday and realized how slow this system is compared to my A1200 with a Blizzard 1230 MKIV which is also a '030 and only 10mhz faster
It feels like the GVP '030 40mhz is 50% slower or more  :-o
I have the kickstart mapped into fast memory with the GVP utility and the command CPU CACHE BURST in my startup-sequence so the caches are on
Today I installed the ClassicWB ADV package which is based on WB3x (had OS3.9 installed previously) so I thought it was OS3.9 which slowed things down but not.
Have I missed something to squeeze more power out of my '030 or is the side expansion bus of my A500 a big bottleneck?
btw using a 2.1 gig 5400rpm SCSI drive inside the GVP A530

[redrumloa]

Have I missed something to squeeze more power out of my '030

Set Workbench to 4 colors.

[Doppie1200]

AMIGAZ wrote:
is the side expansion bus of my A500 a big bottleneck?

Could be. But my bet is the chipset is much slower.
The 030 in the A500 is doing more nose picking per second than the one in the A1200 does.

It's a common problem with amiga's. Put in a hugely powerfull processor and the chipset that would otherwise help your CPU is then slowing it down.

[Amigaz]

redrumloa wrote:

Have I missed something to squeeze more power out of my '030

Set Workbench to 4 colors.

You mean the AGA circuits are faster than the ECS maybe?  :-P

[Amigaz]

Doppie1200 wrote:

AMIGAZ wrote:
is the side expansion bus of my A500 a big bottleneck?

Could be. But my bet is the chipset is much slower.
The 030 in the A500 is doing more nose picking per second than the one in the A1200 does.

It's a common problem with amiga's. Put in a hugely powerfull processor and the chipset that would otherwise help your CPU is then slowing it down.

That's what i'm starting to suspect
Or it's the ECS graphics that is making everything so damn slow or the expansion bus is 16bit?

[KThunder]

how much ram do you have in the 530? ideally you should have the ram maxed out in the 530 and no fast ram in the 500 itself. a 4color wb should fly even on ecs interlace
having all fast ram in the 530 should speed things up alot.
btw what exactly feels slow, overall response? or wb or some particular program you are trying to run

[Amigaz]

KThunder wrote:
how much ram do you have in the 530? ideally you should have the ram maxed out in the 530 and no fast ram in the 500 itself. a 4color wb should fly even on ecs interlace
having all fast ram in the 530 should speed things up alot.
btw what exactly feels slow, overall response? or wb or some particular program you are trying to run

Have 2mb chip ram in the A500+ and max ram in the A530 (8mb)

Everything feels slow, the thing that annoys me trhe most is that opening windows/showing icons is as slow on my stock A1200 (4mb fastram) and running tasks/programs also feel slow..just a little bit faster than on my stock A1200

[Zac67]

Sounds a lot like 16 colors sucking 90% of chipset bandwidth... Try 4 (or maybe colors, that'll help a LOT.

[patrik]

@AMIGAZ:

Chech if exec.library is in fastmem with Sysinfo - the library list shows in which type of memory each library is allocated. If it is in chipmem, use FastExec to move it to fastmem.

Burst enabled for the datacache might make things slower on a 030. Burst speeds up sequential accesses and punishes non-sequential accesses and data accesses usually arent extremely sequential. This in combination with the 030s small cache..

So skip the "Cpu CACHE BURST" and just let SetPatch enable the caches as usual. It will enable both instruction and datacache for you, but only enable burst for instruction cache (instruction loading tends to be very sequential).

As others have mentioned, the more colours you use, the less chipram bandwidth will be available when say rendering graphics:
Hires/Hires Lace 2 and 4colours: 3.5MB/Sec write (max)
Hires/Hires Lace 8colours: 2.5MB/Sec write
Hires/Hires Lace 16colours: 1.5MB/Sec write

No read results, but I dont have them in my head and the A2000 is tucked away at the moment.


/Patrik

[mr_a500]

Or it's the ECS graphics that is making everything so damn slow or the expansion bus is 16bit?

I was going to say it's the kickstart, but you say it is mapped to fast RAM. When using the A500 3.1 ROM, my A500 runs at half the speed of using the A1200 3.0 ROMs on my Viper card.

I'm going to guess it's the expansion bus then. My A500 with 33Mhz 68020 (16 colour WB) feels pretty fast. The Viper expansion uses the CPU slot instead of the expansion bus.

You could try to speed it up a bit with SystemPatch. I noticed about a 10% improvement in window/icon drawing.

[patrik]

@mr_a500:

Both the Viper and the A530 are connected to the same bus, just at the opposite ends.

How fast/slow something feels to a person, is very relative.


/Patrik

[Zac67]

@patrik: the impact of using >4 colors has on chip mem speed depends severly on overscan use - if you use extreme overscan (I always did before I had a gfx card, but I did have fast mem), the impact will be a lot higher.
With 16 colors the bus is 100% loaded while the scan line data is fetched and the CPU stalls. The CPU has to wait for the end of the scan line and with max overscan it's only a handful of cycles before the next line starts fetching, AFAIR it's <1/2 of non overscan bandwidth left.

[mr_a500]

Both the Viper and the A530 are connected to the same bus, just at the opposite ends.

So, you're saying that expansion through the CPU slot would be the same speed as expansion through the side expansion slot?

How fast/slow something feels to a person, is very relative.

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. Maybe AMIGAZ can do an AIBB module or something, then we can have real numbers to compare.

When I say "feels fast" I mean opening a window with 30 16 colour folder icons takes less than 3 seconds and opening a program like FinalWriter or Wordworth on a 16 colour screen takes about 2 seconds.

[patrik]

@Zac67:

Cheers.


@mr_a500:

So, you're saying that expansion through the CPU slot would be the same speed as expansion through the side expansion slot?

Yes.


/Patrik

[bloodline]

mr_a500 wrote:

Both the Viper and the A530 are connected to the same bus, just at the opposite ends.

So, you're saying that expansion through the CPU slot would be the same speed as expansion through the side expansion slot?

They are both basically ZorroII