PC still playing Amiga catchup

[Wayne]

@stefcep

I understand your need to feel like the 1985 Amiga is still as capable as a modern day PC or Mac.  I really do.  Everyone feels the need to justify why they're still running what they do, especially in light of overwhelming evidence to support the contrary.

Using an Amiga today is a hobby for everyone, and I mean 99.999% of everyone on the planet.  Aside from the strange car wash or local public television station, there are literally no more legitimate uses for an Amiga in a professional setting.  

Take away professional settings, and you're left with personal use, which -- when you consider there are better and faster alternatives out there -- means "a hobby".

There's nothing wrong with that.

For the record, I loathe Windows to my very core and even moreso when I have to use it at work.

That being said, there simply isn't any single way on the planet that you can compare a 2 GIGAhertz machine to a 7 (or even 14) MEGAhertz computer and have the latter come out ahead in ANY category on the planet.  Sorry.  You just can't do it.

I often laugh when some people trot out reboot times and "I don't have to shut my machine down".

What you, and every other stalwart defender of the faith always forget is that yes, Windows and Macs take longer to boot, but when they boot, they're loading up easily 100 times more active features than the antiquated Amiga.  

If you want a fair test on boot times, take your 14mhz machine, load it down with network stacks, font handling stacks, printer handlers, and everything else that a stock Windows box does by default.  Have it then automatically connect to everything from your printer to the network to.. well, everything that Windows does automatically, then time it from the moment you hit the power button until the time the hard drive quits gronking.

You *will* find that your precious little Amiga will take -- at a minimum -- more time to boot than even a mid-level Windows box.  That is, *if* you could get the Amiga to even load 1/10th the features that Windows has, and you can't do it because frankly, the features Windows has by base install don't even exist for the Amiga.

I don't say this to tear you down.  I really don't.  Like I said, I'm a Mac guy and I hate Windows as much as you do, but... You can't sit here defending the Amiga as being better because it boots faster and come out sounding the least bit credible.  It just makes you sound like a fanboy, which I'm sure is not your intent.

Also for the record, prior to the demise of my last Windows box, which I worked on 10 hours a day, 6 days a week professionally for an Internet Registrar doing everything from programming to tech support.  During that time, my average "up time" (between reboots) was well over 6 months between reboots for a matter of 8 YEARS.  

Most of those reboots caused by extended power outages which drained the UPS system I have in place.

Live well, Learn much, Love often,

Wayne

[Trev]

i can assure you its not 20 seconds, its no less than 2 minutes, often 2 and half.

That's an entirely arbitrary statement. My PC boots MS-DOS in less than one second (after POST, which takes a bit longer--system firmware is quite complex these days, with more features than your average Amiga). That's much faster than any of my Amigas. Is it a useful measurement? No, because there's no direct correlation between the two systems, and ...

... here's where someone argues that no one uses MS-DOS. Well, no one uses AmigaOS, either. I'd wager there are more active MS-DOS users (millions, even) than there are active AmigaOS users. If you don't believe me, then you don't spend enough time in front of embedded systems.

Everyone really does need to straighten out their definitions of real-time. Karlos is talking computer science, everyone else is talking user perception. There is no "real-time" in user perception. Humans are neat, but we have lots of built-in latency. Milliseconds have passed before I know I've pricked my finger, for example.

Personally, I can do more useful work in a shorter amount of time on my Windows system (Core i7 920, 6GB RAM, GeForce 8800 GTS 512 (G92), blah blah blah). The Amigas are just for fun.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Neither Linux or AmigaOS are realtime OS's and damn well you know it.

No, I really thought the amiga had fixed time slicing.

A nice read:rtos

[Trev]

No, I really thought the amiga had fixed time slicing.

No, tasks and interrupts can be preempted in unpredictable ways.

[Karlos]

No, I really thought the amiga had fixed time slicing.

A nice read:rtos

Well, AmigaOS generally tasks run for at least an exec quantum of time before being preemptively switched out. However, as Trev says, all kinds of other things can happen in unpredictable ways.

AmigaOS is most assuredly not a RTOS, however it is so damned efficient that for the most part it behaves as if it were one. Right up until it hits heavy CPU load.

[TheMagicM]

I'll give you THREE:

1. Boot up time
2. Shut down time
3. Application launch time  (and don't give me the spiel about how much bigger modern apps are because they do so much more so ofcourse they' take longer to load, thats all negated by the fact that you're running those apps on hardware specs that are many many factors faster clock speed and higher capacity ram and bussess, than the hardware used to launch Amiga apps.)

Last I heard, MS-DOS whips AmigaOS in boot time, shutdown time, application launch time.

[orb85750]

@stefcep



Using an Amiga today is a hobby for everyone, and I mean 99.999% of everyone on the planet.  Aside from the strange car wash or local public television station, there are literally no more legitimate uses for an Amiga in a professional setting.  

No, no.  I just yesterday sold a monitor to a gentleman in Canada in urgent need of it because they use an Amiga 4000/30 to run their business.  I've asked for the details, but he has not responded.  Fact is that many professional uses from the 80s and 90s are still relevant today.   PCs have surpassed Amiga in this regard, but that does not make Amiga obsolete unless you make the personal choice to declare it as such

[orb85750]

In a similar vein, let me say that it may be good to ponder the thought that many of the greatest creative works of the past were produced with technology that is today considered "obsolete."

[Trev]

In a similar vein, let me say that it may be good to ponder the thought that many of the greatest creative works of the past were produced with technology that is today considered "obsolete."

I don't think anyone's attempting to argue that a synthesized violin is a better instrument than a Stradivarius; however, the Amiga is not a Stradivarius.

I'm not an advocate of upgrading for upgrading's sake, so if a process designed for the Amiga still does the job it was meant to do, good for the process and the Amiga. There comes a time, however, when that system's total cost of ownership (or the risks associated with a possible failure of that system) will outweigh its return. Anyone that doesn't upgrade at that point in time (or really, slightly before) is putting their livelihood at risk.

EDIT: Let's also not forget Amiga.org's own recent history re: PHP obsolescence.

[Daedalus]

Last I heard, MS-DOS whips AmigaOS in boot time, shutdown time, application launch time.

I think you'll find that MS-DOS only equals AmigaOS in shut down time i.e., instant. While I do think anyone saying their classic machine beats any modern PC at anything other than reading Amiga floppies is nuts, I will say that the "average" PC experience of myself and everyone I have contact with in the real world is one of waiting - waiting for the list of apps to appear in the Start menu, waiting for a window to minimise so they can access the window open behind it. This is an everyday thing that everyone I work with just accepts, but does my head in because I know it doesn't have to be like that. True, they're not cutting edge machines, but they're all only running XP OTOH which is now 7-ish years old. This is most definitely a Windows thing rather than a hardware thing, and maybe with some better programming of the Windows task and memory handling it could be much better. But as it stands, the average Windows machine that people use every day can't hold a candle to a top-end machine running Linux, or even AmigaOS4 in terms of responsiveness. Responsiveness is really where it ends with AmigaOS though; a well configured, high powered PC can do it, but the average machines that most office workers in the world have to use simply can't, and that is actually the average experience.

[Trev]

@Daedalus

You know most of the "delays" in Windows, e.g. Start Menu pop-ups, are artificial, right?  They're based on user interface studies, psychological studies, etc. Some things, though, like waiting for a window to minimize, have more to do with the application itself than Windows, i.e. the application has to respond to your minimize request and maybe it's still busy doing something else, like waiting on a synchronization object that's invisible to the user. The real problem with Windows is the differentiation among applications. Every developer thinks they know better than Microsoft (some actually do, and they're probably not running Windows) and instead of doing something the standard way, they do it their own way. The same problem happens on the Amiga when developers ignore the RKMs.

@Karlos

http://www.techpowerup.com/95445/ASUS_Designes_Own_Monster_Dual-GTX_285_4_GB_Graphics_Card.html

[orb85750]

You wrote:
"I don't think anyone's attempting to argue that a synthesized violin is a better instrument than a Stradivarius; however, the Amiga is not a Stradivarius. [...]"
---------
Then let me use an apples compared with apples argument versus your apples (electronic) compared with oranges (extremely well-crafted acoustic) argument.  Take much of the early electronic music work of the late 70s and early 80s.  Much of it far surpasses what is put out with today's modern synthesizers.   Sure, it did generally take more thought, technical understanding, and ingenuity to produce great electronic music 3 decades ago than it does today.  However, it should not be considered ludicrous that perhaps some of that older technology had *some* advantages over the current high tech equipment of 2009.  I don't believe that progress in every last subcategory of every category is linear (or even monatonic).  Market/corporate forces, which are what usually pushes new technology, simply are not 100% efficient/intelligent.

[Karlos]

@Karlos

http://www.techpowerup.com/95445/ASUS_Designes_Own_Monster_Dual-GTX_285_4_GB_Graphics_Card.html

Holy crap :laughing:

I'm waiting to see what the G300 series does, though. Let's face it, fast as they are, there are lots of improvements that could be made to the arithmetic units. Double precision performance is still dire (compared to single, still faster than your CPU).

[Karlos]

Thanks for clarifying.  You are just using some souped up graphics card.  Nothing to do with PC running 100s of processes.  And you forgot to answer the rest of the message.

And you still violate the law of conservation even with quad core since there's still some overhead involved.

Wrong. There were > 100 CPU processes, not GPU processes. There was precisely one CPU process for that simulation. "ps aux wwwf | less" is hardly going to report on GPU processes, now is it? :roflmao:

Four of those CPU processes are capable of being in the run state concurrently provided they aren't making atomic operations on the same area of memory. Which is highly unlikely because this is a virtual memory system. Most of the processes have no idea the others exist, let alone have the opportunity to lock something they own.

Just for you, I've dumped the current process list. Too big to post here, so here it is: process.txt

I make that 171 processes at the moment. You should see it when it is actually busy.

-edit-

Oh, and as for the rest of your objection:

I doubt even more that you can have EUAE running on top with PCI bus busy as it is. Why only look at the processor speed-- there's other things Amiga can do besides compare processor speeds. Why don't you try reading the joystick at 1Khz while doing all those things? Why not time things to cycle accuracy while your running your PCI transfers? I can't even time a 500Khz event on the latest PC without synchronization going off if I have a WIFI card plugged in (not even surfing the web).

My god, you are living so far in the past it's hilarious. EUAE runs just fine, even on top of that CUDA simulation.

If you can't time a 500khz event properly on your PC without sync going off it's probably because you are either

1) Using a crap OS (which given the rest of your assertion I'm assuming is windows)
2) Using a crap PC. Harder to verify, but not impossible.

As for your claim the machine is somehow too maxed out with the simulation to run EUAE. try reading the specifications for PCI Express 2.0 16-lane and then come back when you've understood it. Total bandwidth for a single 16 lane device is ~8000MB/s. The simulation was only shifting around 400MB/s. Plenty of room left to shove EUAE's framebuffer into the primary X display.

I'm using a decent OS on good hardware. It may have escaped your attention back there in the 1980's, but present day POSIX compliant systems now require nanosecond accuracy for timing. The Linux kernel uses a busy loop to calibrate the maximum execution speed of your CPU at boot time. With this, you can, if you need it, have a busy wait that is accurate to a few machine cycles, though it will cost you load.

Oh by the way, PCs do slow down to a crawl because so much viruses/spyware comes into the PC easily because no one knows exactly which file is meant for what and whether it's in its original state or tampered

Well, again, you are failing to differentiate the OS from the machine. For the nth time, Windows != PC. Use a decent OS, you don't get these problems.

[Daedalus]

@Trev

Yup I do know I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about things like the border being drawn, but instead of the list of applications, for about a second you get the "searching" flashlight until the icons appear. Same with the task switching, I'd guess it's VM-related seeing as it'll only happen if the inactive window hasn't been touched for a while, but it does seem to be common to most average-spec machines that are a year or two old, and for most users, most of which don't do anything more extravagant than send mail and run Excel.

[TheMagicM]

I think you'll find that MS-DOS only equals AmigaOS in shut down time i.e., instant. While I do think anyone saying their classic machine beats any modern PC at anything other than reading Amiga floppies is nuts, I will say that the "average" PC experience of myself and everyone I have contact with in the real world is one of waiting - waiting for the list of apps to appear in the Start menu, waiting for a window to minimise so they can access the window open behind it. This is an everyday thing that everyone I work with just accepts, but does my head in because I know it doesn't have to be like that. True, they're not cutting edge machines, but they're all only running XP OTOH which is now 7-ish years old. This is most definitely a Windows thing rather than a hardware thing, and maybe with some better programming of the Windows task and memory handling it could be much better. But as it stands, the average Windows machine that people use every day can't hold a candle to a top-end machine running Linux, or even AmigaOS4 in terms of responsiveness. Responsiveness is really where it ends with AmigaOS though; a well configured, high powered PC can do it, but the average machines that most office workers in the world have to use simply can't, and that is actually the average experience.

My god man...you must be running XP on a 486.  Every machine I've had from my AMD 2200+ CPU based system to my Quad core system runnning XP to Vista, I've never had any issues like that ever.    

My "everyday office computer" at work is very responsive also.  Its a Dell core2duo laptop w/a 17" display, 4 gigs ram running XP.

The people I've run into that have slow systems are the same people who do not maintain it.  You throw garbage into Windows you'll get garbage out.  You take care of Windows, it'll take care of you.  Its not the most reliable OS but it works.