PC still playing Amiga catchup

[adz]

How much faster does the MOS 8501 boot?

What use would an average user have for a 78MP TIFF image?  How long will your PC take to finish the calculations that are done by IBM's network of supercomputers in one second?  Pointless argument..

As stated earlier in this thread a C16 boots in under a second, but to quote you, it's a "Pointless argument.."

The 78MP TIFF image is just an example, ripping a DVD, something that the average PC user does quite a lot of, is another example of something that would take a ridiculously long time on an Amiga.

[persia]

A realistic photo for someone who is doing more than just shooting family shots would be 12 to 14 MP Raw.  Not something you could edit on an Amiga.  This whole discussion entered never-never land a while ago, with one side mentioning DVDs, MP3s, Flashing, photos etc and the other side countering with some incomprehensible joystick argument.

As stated earlier in this thread a C16 boots in under a second, but to quote you, it's a "Pointless argument.."

The 78MP TIFF image is just an example, ripping a DVD, something that the average PC user does quite a lot of, is another example of something that would take a ridiculously long time on an Amiga.

[stefcep2]

As stated earlier in this thread a C16 boots in under a second, but to quote you, it's a "Pointless argument.."

The 78MP TIFF image is just an example, ripping a DVD, something that the average PC user does quite a lot of, is another example of something that would take a ridiculously long time on an Amiga.

A PC has 100-1000 times CPU cycles of a 14 mhz Amiga but boots 150sec/5sec=30 times slower.  The 14 mhz 68020 is has about 10 times the CPU clock cycles of the c16 but boots 5sec/1sec = 5 times slower..waiting for 4 seconds more is a lot more tolerable than waiting for an additional 150 seconds..

Ofcourse things that are CPU-intensive take longer on slower CPU's. BUT starting your PC, issuing commands and general responsiveness via the GUI is still slower on the PC than the Amiga.

[Trev]

Just off the top of my head...

I think film based movies were 24FPS, NTSC is around 30FPS and PAL is like 29FPS.

If you don't believe your EYES can tell the difference between 60 FPS and 75 FPS, just try and use 1600x1200 resolution on a CRT monitor with a 60hz refresh rate. Painful…

Are we or are we not Amiga users? Broadcast video standards are the one thing we should all know, yeah? Film can be shot and projected at whatever mechanical rate the camera and projector are capable of using. 24 FPS is the de facto standard. NTSC is ~29.97 FPS and PAL is 25 FPS. (NTSC and PAL technically use fields and not frames, but we know that, too, right?)

Regarding what you can and can't see, it's subjective, just like the Amiga v. PC debate. ;-)

[Trev]

BUT starting your PC, issuing commands and general responsiveness via the GUI is still slower on the PC than the Amiga.

I haven't been using computers as long as some on this forum (I started in the early 80's), but I know this: I have never used a computer more responsive, subjectively speaking, than my current Windows system.

[adz]

A realistic photo for someone who is doing more than just shooting family shots would be 12 to 14 MP Raw.  Not something you could edit on an Amiga.  This whole discussion entered never-never land a while ago, with one side mentioning DVDs, MP3s, Flashing, photos etc and the other side countering with some incomprehensible joystick argument.

It's called troll feeding and it's great fun :roflmao:

[Trev]

If only flames did as much damage to forum trolls as they did to "real" ones.

[Karlos]

My A4000 6-7 years ago was a used as a server for 6 months straight without rebooting.

Running a basic OS3 or OS3.1 install on the base machine, possibly. Even then, you were lucky.

One minute?  We've been down that path with your souped-up, hardware hacked/overclocked, custom_OS running PC that you run 24/7.  You are in the infinitesimal minority of PC users.  Your experience doesn't count.

:roflmao:

Put your toys back in your pram and think about what you just wrote. My experience doesn't count simply because it is contrary to yours? A PC made entirely of off-the-shelf components, only one of which is overclocked (the graphics card) and running the most popular open source OS in the world counts as a hacked/overclocked custom OS PC? Do you have any idea how ridiculously petulant you sound?

I can name two other users right here on this very board that have PC's in the same hardware class as mine. 2GHz multicore is not a minority, it is pretty much the norm for current generation machines.

Further you've resorted to calling me and the millions of Windows users and MS itself, for whom boot times matter, "insane", and we are all "suffering from attention-deficit disorder". Name-calling is the last resort of those who simply can no longer defend their argument.

No, I've suggested that if having to wait 1 minute is too stressful for you then you probably have it. Not the millions of others for whom it is a minor inconvenience at best.

We've talked about your frankenstein A1200 before.  It doesn't count.

Bit hypocritical of you to slate my A1200 for having 2 CPU's and as much memory as I could throw into it. Why isn't it "souped up", like the PC instead? It's expanded with entirely legitimate expansions. There's nothing sat hanging upside down from one of the custom chips or dangling off the clockport. There aren't any low level hacks running in the OS.

By the sound of it, your definition of frankenstein is any amiga with a faster CPU fitted.

You have 4 CPU's running at 2,400 mhz. 4x2400 about 10,000.

One 14 mhz 020 boots faster than your 10,000 mhz of total CPU power machine.'  Nuff said.

Of course, if you knew the first thing about multicore computing you'd know that performance is not a simple linear scale up of clockspeed x cores. Also you'd know that only threaded applications or multiple concurrent instances of single threaded applications benefit.

[amigaksi]

Oh, my God! This flame made me laugh out loud at least twice. This joystick polling frequency argument frankly is the most silly I've ever heard in a computer architecture discussion, even more ridicolous than the old boot-time whining, and the only conclusion I can see for it, is that my Commodore 16 was the most powerful PC of all times, since it "booted" instantly, even faster than my later Commodore 128 (which took at least 1 second to initialize). My Amigas and then my PCs have always took more time to be ready for my input. So the C16 is the absolute winner here =)

PS: everywhere else, a "joystick polling frequency" argument would have been motivation for laughs, not for a 200 messages-long discussion. Please, let's do a reality check soon.

You missed some posts and didn't read the title; nobody drew the conclusion that PC is inferior because it boots up slower.  Nobody drew the conclusion that PC is inferior because it's gameport factually is inferior.  Except for those like you who didn't read the topic and the posts.  I recall that my 8-bit Commodore didn't even have a boot option unless you plugged in a cartridge.  I think you had to type something like: Load "*",8,1.

Gaming is used on PCs, Gaming is used on Amigas.  Amiga has the better interface.  It's one aspect.  And same joystick port also serves other needs like I/O...

[amigaksi]

Don't forget about the mighty VIC-20! Clearly beats the lame C16!:whack:

Honestly, I've got no idea what such a joystick polling frequency is meant to accomplish. 1 kHz is far beyond ridiculous - who's supposed to move the stick that fast?? And don't forget the (formerly) common PC joystick is an analogue entity where it takes a bit for the ADC to work. Digital joysticks are a lot faster. Actually they were since the joyports have been gone for some time.

Actually it's more of a 'I want a 100% defined hardware base where I can bang bare metal as I see fit' against a hardware abstracted architecture, held together with drivers. Clearly the former is easier to code for, but the fate of the Amiga clearly shows what consequences are implied and which one is a more future oriented solution.

My .02

"Clearly" is your subjective biased remark.  It's better to have hardware level standards and OS API standards.  That you get the best of both worlds.  With modern OSes, you HAVE to go through APIs because ways to access hardware directly (which is much more efficient) cannot be done due to lack of standards for most hardware.

You're correct for many games you can get away with less than 1Khz, but in cases, you do need the 1Khz, gameport cannot accomplish that feat.  As Karlos would put it, "Amiga joystick is OBSCENELY faster than PC joystick interface."

[amigaksi]

So how are these people who don't optimize their code a fault of the system design?

...

You are presuming in this topic that I declared the PC sucks because it has bloated code, but I never stated that.

>Congratulations. How did this ever pass off as a valid argument when you wrote it down? I can make you a 1 GB hello world example to compile, that's how much PC:s suck!

Again, just going by default compiler settings.  Not purposely done.  Many people don't bother figuring out what is dead code and how to eliminate it so you end up with EXEs that take up megabytes of memory.  Never said PC sucks because it's full of applications that have tons of dead code or redundant code.

>That's totally besides the point. Weren't we discussing program size in relation to speed? Because MPEG files are not programs, and a smaller program doesn't mean a faster program.

The example I gave of animations running from floppy, the size of the data files and exes combined mattered.  If they weren't compressed and code highly optimized, the frame rate speed would suffer.

>That's true for most 1k intros (which are often tightly tied to the features of a specific GPU), but I have some great looking 256 byte intros (that often use standard VGA software rendering) and 64k (which work on most graphics cards) that run on anything I throw them at. Now show me a demo that runs on any "standard" amiga without modification i e WHDLoad.

Many boot block intros I have seen don't rely on any WHDLoad.  If you write OCS software, it works on all Amigas.  You show me a demo that uses the audio card; they are all nonstandard.  Here's I wrote my own boot block control code that allows me to control the Amiga from a PC:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&item=320379502506

I answered the rest of your message already elsewhere.

>But yeah, go ahead, show me a game that uses and benefits from that high joystick sampling. Most Amiga games, I'm sure, don't sample more than a couple of times per redraw.

I wasn't going by "most".  Just like the audio example I gave.  One Khz is based on actual recorded joystick data from River-raid as I already mentioned.

>Confused? That makes two of us, then. Yes, you do need pretty tight timing to transfer data at 5 GB/s, and the latency is lower than ever with USB (not that latency was ever an inherent problem with USB pads and sticks).

You can't time a bit to appear to a device at an exact point in time unless you take over the hardware and have the exact spec of the controller.  But then you mine as well plug the usb card into an Amiga and do the same.  And this has nothing to do with joystick I/O.

>...of years there will be more users of USB 3.0 enabled PC:s than there were ever Amiga users.

Sorry, I don't argue about nonexistent products.  If you don't have a joystick port, it's not my problem.  Maybe the spec will get dropped and replaced with a different one.

Joystick I/O was a bonus to the joystick interface; first you need to pick the joystick port before talking about I/O.  If you switch ports, I'll start talking about the expansion connector.

[amigaksi]

As stated earlier in this thread a C16 boots in under a second, but to quote you, it's a "Pointless argument.."

The 78MP TIFF image is just an example, ripping a DVD, something that the average PC user does quite a lot of, is another example of something that would take a ridiculously long time on an Amiga.

Boot up with what you want to do with the system is a better way to look at it.  If I want to test a kernel mode driver on Windows XP which will cause many crashes during testing stage, the Amiga OS wins hands down in boot up time.  

As far as the 78MP TIFF image goes, you could tile the image and use a format that fits for the system at hand.  Just because PCs had ability to load into RAM (or virtual RAM), doesn't mean it can't be done on systems with less memory.  I have written software that can edit 600MB images using 16 MB of RAM.  It's nothing to do with the system.  It depends on the software.

[Karlos]

I have written software that can edit 600MB images using 16 MB of RAM.  It's nothing to do with the system.  It depends on the software.

This I'd be interested to see. Do you use a paging strategy for it, or do you limit it to the largest tile that can fit in 16MiB?

How do you give visual feedback on changes that affect the whole image, or do you allow modification only on a per tile basis?

I've written image processing code that operates on arbitrarily large images in a few kilobytes by basically streaming through it (for simple changes) or operating on tiny tiles (for image processing kernels). It worked but it certainly wasn't "visual". That didn't matter as it was for an automated process anyway.

This isn't a criticism, but I can't imagine such a system being a lot of use to people used to being able to operate at various levels of zoom as well as on the entire image at once. People buy big grunty PC boxes because they expect to be able to do stuff as quickly and readily as possible.

[GadgetMaster]

Erm... can someone condense this whole thread into a nutshell please. It's been all around the universe and back and I'm  still confused. :crazy:

Is the PC still playing catchup? I mean really :lol:

[Karlos]

Erm... can someone condense this whole thread into a nutshell please. It's been all around the universe and back and I'm  still confused. :crazy:

Is the PC still playing catchup? I mean really :lol:

I don't think so. Even if we accept the joyport example, external HID for PC's have all migrated pretty much to USB these days. Honestly, you can even get bloody USB graphics cards nowadays. Therefore the PC isn't actually in the race to have a high speed joyport, so it can't really be playing catch up. The same is true with other legacy expansion ports like good old centronic's parallel ports etc.Who uses a parallel port printer in a typical PC dominated office environment now? LAN printers have been standard for donkeys years.

I know I've contributed (as much as a flame fest can have contributions) to this thread but the reality is, we're all comparing oranges and apples here. 15-20 year old computers of any description, Amiga, Atari, PC, Mac, Sun are all in a completely different league to present day computers.

Hell, present day computers will be equally outclassed in raw processing power in a lot less than 15-20 years from now.

We all know the best computer platform from it's era was the Amiga, that's why we are here on this forum. However, like it or not, the platform is an extreme minority in the present day. There's no hardware to bridge the gap between then now. Cool as the A1, Sam and Pegasos are, they too are sliding further behind the relentless march in computer evolution. Unless AmigaOS and MorphOS take a leaf out of apple's book and jump the CPU architecture fence over to the x86/x64 side, they'll never really be able to take full advantage of that progress. However, as cool as that would be, it would also be quite sad IMO since variety is the spice of life. I actually like having systems with different CPU's and ways of working. It's fun. And since AROS at least is free to explore the x86/x64 avenue, well, you can have it all, really.

[smerf]

Hi,

@Karlos,

Ok, enough, it takes you 30 seconds to reinit your computer from leaving it on, well guess what I left my Amiga on all night, all I did was turn off the LCD, turned back on my LCD and the Amiga was there ready and waiting, but darn I had to wait for my 24 inch LCD to turn on it took a total of 3 seconds, next time I won't turn if off hate waiting for this new stuff to work.

Now, lets talk about loading in a new fresh copy of your OS,

How long does it take windblows?

How long does it take Linux?

How long does it take Amiga OS 3.1?

How long does it take Amiga OS 3.1 with OS 3.9?

AMIGA WINS!!!

Windows SUCKS

Linux comes in 2nd

The PC is still trying to catch up to Amiga

smerf