About multitasking, what's best : AmigaOS, Linux, or Winblows XP ?

[Piru]

Yes, I know (didn't think twice before posting) but what if it was designed for 68010s with MMU instead (and virtual memory and memory protection capabilities) instead?

IIRC the 68010 couldn't use external MMU either, only 020 and later, but I could be wrong. 68010 did have some way to expand the memory map however (different pages, sort of).

However, if it would work, it'd be damned slow, as one can expect from 7Mhz chip (not to mention to ultraslow medium from that era, even SCSI sucked eggs...).

[Zac67]

The 68010 was especially designed to be used with the 68841 MMU - but the MMU would have put an additional wait state on the memory. Plus the additional overhead needed for memory protection would've made quite a bit of a difference (context changes are far more extensive).

Message passing could've been done by allocating 'public' memory and then passing a pointer - of course this would have caused one tiny bit of less memory protection. ;-)

[KThunder]

   system resources and resource usage is a circular type of thing. the more you have the more you want etc.
  and that goes for developers too. back when the pc first came out i believe it was bill gates who said who would ever need 640k or something like that. at the same time there were probably programmers thinking i know what i could do with 640k.
   an os designed for todays hardware that was designed to be small and efficient would be great. but to do what we do with computers today you would have to add so many 3rd party apps it would be as large as xp. but it wouldnt be made by one developer so it would be a mess.

[tormedhammaren]

It looks like Billie boy actually never made the claim:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.folklore.computers/msg/99ce4b0555bf35f4

[Hammer]

And thats before we take into account the custom chipset that the Amiga has, which allows the OS to offload tasks from the CPU. Not only is the OS different, but the hardware is completely different. The PC OS expects the CPU to do everything,

The statement "PC OS expects the CPU to do everything" is wrong.

For example, refer to cache coherent DMA issues with AmigaOS 3.x/Classic Amiga HW, AmigaOS 4.0/A1 HW vs modern PC HW/mainstream OS.  

Unlike AmigaOS3.x/4.x, both Linux X86 and Windows expects the hardware to do cache coherent DMA functions transparently.  

AMD K8’s integrated Northbridge can speculatively pre-fetch data without OS or CPU’s intervention. This is also true for nVidia’s nForce 2 Northbridge (for K7).  

AMD's hypertransport links operates transparently in X86 OSes without specific hypertransport support.

In "pure" DX8 and DX9 PC HW, Vextex and Pixel Shaders are programs for GpGPU. CPU may intervene for JIT shader re-compile. Think of it like a JIT SIMD/MIMD re-complier for GPU’s SIMD/MIMD shader engine i.e. for maximizing specific GpGPU features and frame rates.

We all know the results of CPU driven DX 3D 7/8/9 Reference Render vs DX 3D 7/8/9 HW render in regards to frame rates.  

AmigaDOS doesn't. Ok, so the PC has GPUs... these didnt really come of age until, say the advent of the Nvidia G-Force Yes, I know there have been grpahics accelerators for the PC since the 80s, but these really relied on optimised CPU drivers.

They are not CPU drivers. In basic Windows API accelerators, line draws is offloaded to 2D accelerators.

One could argue that is still the case, as a driver is still needed for the latest video card or physics processor,

Gfx's driver maps to Windows API.

[Hammer]

The reason your A3000 crashes on you is because, conciously or not, you're probably trying to use the Amiga in the same way you use your wintel box. If your Amiga had unlimited memory, a faster system bus, and updated chipset all those "queen-size" applications would run much better and more efficiently than on a PC simply because the basic architecture (of the Amiga) is superior.

Run AmigaOS3.9 in WinUAE 1.3 on a modern PC with 2GB of dual channel DDR-2 800 ram. A "userland" application can still crash(reboot) the AmigaOS environment.

[Hammer]

chsedge wrote:
(SNIP)

Yes your 10 month PC is obsolete, the AMIGA obviously not. The AMIGA is the only computer that will never be obsolete...

Depends on the “PC”.

My two year AMD64 laptop PC with 1GB ram and a Radeon 9600 mobile GPU can still run Vista X64/WinXP X64 edition and IA-32/X64 applications.

[KThunder]

also depends on how you define obsolete.
i never liked the term personally
of course i have an amiga 3000 and an athlon classic both of which get much more use than the pIV mobo gathering dust on a shelf.

[koaftder]

The reason your A3000 crashes on you is because, conciously or not, you're probably trying to use the Amiga in the same way you use your wintel box.  If your Amiga had unlimited memory, a faster system bus, and updated chipset all those "queen-size" applications would run much better and more efficiently than on a PC simply because the basic architecture (of the Amiga) is superior.  

I don't use my A3000 like I use my pc because that would be impossible. It has no network interface and no fancy 400 dollar video card. (I have a better chance of meeting Jesus than running into a picasso IV) I sure won't be pimping any mp3s or divx videos on my stock 25MHz a3000. No web browsing, no email, no blender, and no snatching frames from my firewire video camera.

I use it to play games from time to time mostly, and editing text files and screwing around in dpaint. It gurus. Even if you cranked it up to 3GHz added 2gb of ram and a terrabyte of storage, it would still occasionally guru when switching from microemacs to dpaint4.  

Amiga's don't have the brute power that brand new PCs have, but they don't really need it because they get such better mileage from what they do have.  Big windoze applications -- bloated, resource hogs that they are -- run "well" on PCs because of sheer horsepower of the hardware.  They run in spite of XP, not because of it.   I see no elegance whatsoever in Windows, and especially not in Linux.  MacOS doesn't count unless you like the feeling of working in Crayon while simultaenuously being insulted with dumbed-down system nags.  

Every single day on Amiga.org somebody pops up with a question regarding their system that requires some obscure or arcane fix. Patch this, edit these files, goto aminet and preform these 10 steps on the cli and somehow this is all considered elegant.

The following would make the amiga unhappy, but it wouldn't phase linux or NT:

unsigned char * lol = 0 ;
for(int i=0;i<8192;i++){*lol++=0;}

[stopthegop]

unsigned char * lol = 0 ;
for(int i=0;i<8192;i++){*lol++=0;}

Just tried it with the free compiler lcc on my Dell Laptop with XP.  Gave me a blue screen.  Which is why I'm writing this post from Ibrowse on my Amiga..  

[koaftder]

stopthegop wrote:

unsigned char * lol = 0 ;
for(int i=0;i<8192;i++){*lol++=0;}

Just tried it with the free compiler lcc on my Dell Laptop with XP.  Gave me a blue screen.  Which is why I'm writing this post from Ibrowse on my Amiga..  

You are a liar

[koaftder]

koaftder wrote:

stopthegop wrote:

unsigned char * lol = 0 ;
for(int i=0;i<8192;i++){*lol++=0;}

Just tried it with the free compiler lcc on my Dell Laptop with XP.  Gave me a blue screen.  Which is why I'm writing this post from Ibrowse on my Amiga..  

You are a liar

Better yet, i'll give you $100 if you can demonstrate crashing NT kernel by writing zeros to address 0x00000000 through 0x00002000 from userspace.

[stopthegop]

You are a liar

wrong again

[stopthegop]

I just tried running the same program on my HP Jornada w/ Windows CE and it returned fine.  I think the registry is corrupted on my XP box which is why it crashed.  Actually, I already knewthe registry was corrupted.    But the registry being corrupt kind of underscores my whole point about the problem with software OSs in general, especially in a networked world, and especially Windows OS.  The registry is totally vulnerable, yet Windows is completely and utterly dependent on it to work.  That is a bad design.    

[cojones]

I don't understand what you just "proved". You conceded that knew your machine was in an unhealthy state, and you claimed that stressing that state resulted in a system crash. OK, fine, whatever. How do you draw the conclusion that the OS being dependent on a certain data store is "bad design"?

Before you answer, yes, Microsoft does happily admit that mucking about in the registry may cause serious issues. Any KB article that references registry keys carries this warning. This is clearly "by design". But why whould this be a "bad design"? What would be a "good design" (that doesn't also stop a legitimate owner of the machine from configuring the system however they seem fit)?

[whabang]

We already know that the XP registry can make the system unstable, if meddled with, but that doesn't magically make AmigaOS better.