PC still playing Amiga catchup

[stefcep2]

@Linde

 This is a good old "which platform is better" war, like we all used to enjoy back in the late 80's early 90's.

Thats not my angle.  I simply believe that relative to the hardware resources modern PC's are inferior to Amiga in responding to user coomands.  Things that should not be slow on a PC are slow.  There's far too much waiting to do simple things than there should be.

Heres another example: I'm on a c2d 2.4 ghz with 4 gig ram 512 gpu laptop.  Vista.  I go to Firefox menu bar and left click and move across the menu bar: there is a delay in the menu being drawn, I can FEEL the pointer sticking as the mneu is drawn, and as I drag the pointer along i can see the new menu being drawn top-down and bits of the previous menu being erased.  This doesn't even happen on a 14 mhz 68020.  Why?  I read an Australian Commodore and Amiga review article circa 1995: Alta Vista ran on 10 CPU DEC alpha machine with total 6 gig ram.   The same DEC alpha takes ten times longer to render a scene in Real 4D than an Athlon X2 2400, which is slower than my C2D.  So I have a PC with hardware that was faster than that used by a THE major web search engine of a decade ago-but I still have to put up with delays in an app menu being drawn..

The lack of progress is just diappointing.

To the guys using 7 year old XP on current hardware: in 5 years time when you have a 16 core CPU running each at 3 ghz and 32 GIG RAM, 10 terrabytes of solid state hard drive space on a GPU with 8 gig video ram, I'm sure you'll think Vista is a speed demon too, except you'll still be seeing the start menu stutter, still have your 2 minute boots, still have your menus open slowly ON THE CURRENT MS OF THE TIME..

[Karlos]

@stefcep2

The thing is, I stop reading when I get to "Vista", "XP" or anything else on your list of "it's so slow compared to the resources available." Windows is a heavyweight OS that basically tries to start everything and the kitchen sink at boot time. You can tune it if you want and it improves.

However, the catch is, I don't use Windows. I don't use PC's and Windows interchangably like some on the thread have done when they want to highlight what they consider as deficiencies on the PC. They aren't. They are defiencies in Windows and/or it's configuration. Take Windows out of the equation, shove a better OS - of which there are many to choose from - and you can see the raw speed of the machine.

Somebody earlier all but called me a liar for saying firefox 3 starts "instantly" on this machine. I actually took 0.14 seconds, so yeah, I guess I exaggerated. Under Vista, on the same physical box it took about 5 seconds to launch. Clearly the OS performance is a huge factor when it comes to the end user experience.

Seems to me like most "PC" critics here only have experience of one or more flavours of Windows.

Try a different operating system

[amigaksi]

Well, reality is that Commodore may not have been dead if people had bought and developped for (new) AGA machines in mass... But I guess this is also Commodore's fault... They had to convince people, they failed to do so...

Of course it's not valid. When people still wrote 32 colours games, anything concurrent was displaying more colourful pics (be it the PC, SNES,...), and way more powerfull... How could the Amiga be compettitive this way ? Well, it couldn't. And that's what reality is about. This is just market/business. Of course people still used it. And of course people still bought ECS games (for a limited amount of time though). But a market that isn't dynamic is a dead market... Guess that's what happened.

It's always going to be hard for smaller companies to keep up with bigger companies in dynamic situations.  Amiga didn't become obsolete-- it's just the company went bankrupt so further development/research stopped.  People can do their research, but the current innovations aren't making that big of an impact on the average user like going from 16-bit to 32-bit processors or ISA to VESA/PCI or EGA -> VGA.  I have a 2.8Ghz system, 32-bit system.  I don't see much point in going for a 64-bit system if it has problems with backward compatibility and isn't going to have much impact on what I currently use the system for.

[amigaksi]

My question here is, who other than yourself actually cares about how fast they can read the joyport? This is one thing about your argument I really don't quite understand.

What is it you are doing that requires you to poll the joyport on a precision interval? Are you using some sort of homebrew measuring device on it?

That's one example where it's a breeze to not only read the joystick on Amiga but also read it with high precision timing.  Gaming with joysticks was an afterthought on PCs as even gameport was usually on an add-on board.  Gaming was a central concept on Amiga/Atari machines so more relevant.  It all adds up-- joystick I/O, timer IRQs, etc.  not just for me, for everyone.  Don't worry, "I have not yet begun to fight."   Just going to finish up this point before addressing other points.   A gameport uses analog joysticks and requires 1ms+ worse case read-time to get status of joystick directions.  This at 1 Khz would use up all the CPU time whereas on Amiga, it would hardly effect system performance even if performed with high precision timing.  Typical games with fast motion require 1Khz+ sampling of joystick motion.  Joystick ports can also be used for general purpose parallel I/O especially on older platforms like Atari/C64.

[meega]

Heres another example: I'm on a c2d 2.4 ghz with 4 gig ram 512 gpu laptop.  Vista.  I go to Firefox menu bar and left click and move across the menu bar: there is a delay in the menu being drawn, I can FEEL the pointer sticking as the mneu is drawn, and as I drag the pointer along i can see the new menu being drawn top-down and bits of the previous menu being erased.  This doesn't even happen on a 14 mhz 68020.  Why? ...

To the guys using 7 year old XP on current hardware: in 5 years time...

Yet here, on my 7 year old PC with PentiumIV 1.7GHz, 1GB RAM, 32MB graphics (no gpu), XP Pro SP3, Firefox 3 -- there is no such faffing, the menus are fine, they just appear in full form, no appreciable delays, no funny drawing, it's all good. So it doesn't sound like it's either the hardware OR the older OS that is to blame. Maybe you've got yours configured badly?

[Linde]

One thing interesting to note is that Amiga did do 30fps/60fps full screen (overscanned) and ran animations loaded from a floppy disk (880K). Although PC horsepower allows it do 30fs/60fps, not many people spend the time to optimize and make their code/videos efficient since so much memory/hard drive storage is available. I just saw a "hello world" example on modern OSes give an executable output of 1 MB since it was linked and tied to some multi-function crap (MFC).

Sorry, but what does size optimization have to do with speed? That misconception takes away any relevance your argument might have had. Mind you, though, most of the games I play update the screen well faster than the monitor is able to. The reason that there might be some slowdown is that there is generally a lot more going on behind Far Cry 2 than Lotus III. And why would anyone link MFC to a "simple" Hello World?

Regarding "running animations from a floppy disk"... The PC too has a demo scene, and some of the best programmers cram down pretty damn impressive (real-time) animations with sound and music in less than 1k. Pretty hard to imagine happening on the Amiga, no?

Amiga didn't become obsolete-- it's just the company went bankrupt so further development/research stopped.

The A1200 was pretty weak compared to contemporary PC's which had already done fluid 256 color graphics and 16 bit multi-channel sound for some time (even an 8 channel 16-bit stereo consumer sound card had popped up a few months before).

Typical games with fast motion require 1Khz+ sampling of joystick motion.

Really? And no, doing it wouldn't have much of an impact on performance on a multi GHz multi-core processor either way, but it would certainly be a waste of cycles to sample it that often.

Joystick ports can also be used for general purpose parallel I/O especially on older platforms like Atari/C64.

If we are going to look at it like a general purpose I/O port (and yes, I've done that too.) why not compare it to USB 3.0? Let's just say that it's in a different league when it comes to high precision timing.

[stefcep2]

@stefcep2

The thing is, I stop reading when I get to "Vista", "XP" or anything else on your list of "it's so slow compared to the resources available." Windows is a heavyweight OS that basically tries to start everything and the kitchen sink at boot time. You can tune it if you want and it improves.

However, the catch is, I don't use Windows. I don't use PC's and Windows interchangably like some on the thread have done when they want to highlight what they consider as deficiencies on the PC. They aren't. They are defiencies in Windows and/or it's configuration. Take Windows out of the equation, shove a better OS - of which there are many to choose from - and you can see the raw speed of the machine.

Somebody earlier all but called me a liar for saying firefox 3 starts "instantly" on this machine. I actually took 0.14 seconds, so yeah, I guess I exaggerated. Under Vista, on the same physical box it took about 5 seconds to launch. Clearly the OS performance is a huge factor when it comes to the end user experience.



Try a different operating system

Well the term "PC" is now a generic one meaning x86 hardware with a Microsoft OS.  That would be true in more than 95% of cases when someone says "PC".  No-one says "Mac PC's" and how many even say "Linux PC's" ( personally "Linux box" is what I know it as).  And yes I made the point about the mismatch between the user-experience and the hardware specs on modern PC's, and ofcourse this has to be down to the OS ie Windows.  Afterall its the OS that lets you make the hardware do things. You therefore can't isolate the hardware and "say yes i have a responsive computer because I have fast hardware".  Amiga was never just about the hardware, and never just about the OS, but rather it was about the sum of these: thats what determines the user experience.  Microsoft and Apple(less so) are still yet to learn this.

[ElPolloDiabl]

I think everyone has made good arguments.

I didn't mean to start a flame war. I meant for people to suggest what would be different if Amiga was the benchmark OS/Hardware of the 21st century. Seeing how Mr Miner is no longer with us, we will never truly know.

Mr Haynie had his way of doing things we could further argue whether or not that was how Amiga should have progressed (Multi-cpu, home theatre etc.)

I thinks its important that we accomodate a 'headless chicken' approach of doing things. That way everyone gets their 2 cents in.

[Linde]

Well the term "PC" is now a generic one meaning x86 hardware with a Microsoft OS. That would be true in more than 95% of cases when someone says "PC". No-one says "Mac PC's" and how many even say "Linux PC's" ( personally "Linux box" is what I know it as).

Not where I come from, no. A PC running Linux is a PC running Linux ("PC running Linux" and "Linux box" aren't mutually exclusive, you see). As I know it, PC usually refers to the IBM PC compatibles and their current "descendants".

So the whole thing boils down to you grasping for some flawed definition to back your point up. And no, I don't think that Wintel PCs are playing catchup either.

Amiga was never just about the hardware, and never just about the OS, but rather it was about the sum of these: thats what determines the user experience. Microsoft and Apple(less so) are still yet to learn this.

Yes, monolithic system design is the way of the future. Sigh.

[Karlos]

Well the term "PC" is now a generic one meaning x86 hardware with a Microsoft OS.  That would be true in more than 95% of cases when someone says "PC".  No-one says "Mac PC's" and how many even say "Linux PC's" ( personally "Linux box" is what I know it as).  

I totally disagree.

A "Linux Box" where I come from means a box running linux. That can mean anything from a ARM powered Gumstix to a PS3 console, let alone commodity PC's and laptops. People say "Macs", because they've always said it. PowerPC based Macs were called "PowerMacs" for a while to differentiate them from their 68K predecessors. When Apple moved to intel lots of people started using the phrase "intel Mac", though it hasn't really caught on.

If the term PC can be nailed to any one thing it's a hardware x86/AMD64 CPU based computer. PC's have always been able to run more than one operating system.

If anything, I tend to call a PC running WIndows a "windows box". The days when windows ran on non x86/AMD64 cpus are long gone.

[DonnyEMU]

I have stayed out of this topic, but I agree with Karlos quite a bit on what he's been saying. There are a lot of modern pitfalls in both PCs and Mac that don't exist with Amigas, but honestly if I had to say it my PC today lets me do 1000 times more (and when you boot up actually doing 1000 more things in the background that you don't know about)  and working faster in realtime than I could ever do on Classic Amiga hardware and still quite a bit on newer A1 technology.

The problem befalling the newer Amiga hardware is that it's based on older hardware bus standards and the support for things like GPUs and shaders and 3D is still not quite where it needs to be.

Part of the issue is access to the technologies. Most newer Amiga development for GPU has been dependent on information that is available via the "open source" community and firms who don't like to work with them providing information so things like drivers and APIs could be written..

For instance, I haven't used a Radeon 7000 series card in a number of years on a PC. Today everything has went PCI Express.. There are two types of PCI Express cards one with a smaller connector for most major peripherals with all the speed of current USB standards for internal cards. When people think PCI-E here they mainly think new graphics card with one of the smaller connectors and a larger connector attached.

Regular PCI bus is dead and considered legacy in current PCs just like ISA was on AT bus machines..

USB standards are a changing too. Wireless USB is on the horizon which means no more cords for everyone..  By the end of the year a 256 core PC that will be affordable to home/business users is SLATED for release..

My current laptop has 6 gigabytes of RAM , a 500GB internal hard drive and a dual core CPU with 64-bit instruction set and hardware virtualization built-in..

I run Windows 7 with Virtual XP in the background it takes up 256MB to 512MBs and I don't even know it's running. The old 32 bit apps can be run in a virtual screen or integrated along with the Windows 7 apps. I usually install things in Windows 7 versus Virtual XP because the apps run better and faster, whereas Virtual XP is there just for older apps that misbehave or are 16bit applications (I still have two old animation programs from that time period that I love. One is from Jim Kent, who wrote many Amiga animation programs).

Along side that, I run Linux (ubuntu) in a virtual machine on it's own full screen right along side the XP virtual machine, and I have AROS x86 and WinUAE running as well. It's the best of both worlds for me..

For a living I do WPF, and Silverlight applications (yes silverlight apps now run in and out of the web browser and work on PCs, Intel Macs, and soon should run on Linux) and web applications..

The reality of all of this is on this one machine I can run everything and it doesn't matter the cpu, the OS whatever. It just all runs. The machine is a 2.4 GHz CPU so it plays blu-ray DVDs as well.

Do I have viruses and issues, I really haven't, nor have I had viruses since I installed the Vista OS.. Of course I went completely 64-bit and I don't surf to porn site and filesharing sites to download software that I don't own or try to pirate things. There is a lesson to be learned here. I used an alternative virus checker not Norton/Symantec or McAffee. I use something called Avast that is made in Europe. Why these guys are ontop of their game, and they see most of the malware that is written. Most people writing viruses and malware immediately attempt to disable the top two programs that are sold out there. I have no worries with Avast (avast.com)..

My first virus ever was a boot block one and it happened on an Amiga. I have also found viruses on Mac OSX. Why don't we see them on linux, well that's the favored OS of most of the virus/malware writers..

Everytime my PC boots I am running background services (called deamons by some other OSes), like a web server and a SQL server. I honestly don't even notice they are there..

The people who complain the loudest about the PC are usually fanboys of other platforms who are "religious" about their OS experience, and people who have gaps in knowledge about their OS and how to get help not to have issues.. There are user groups and places they could go to learn. Most of them don't because they don't have time and just want to get things done.  The only computer I was ever religious about was the classic Amiga, but PCs improved and I was part of the folks who marched that platform forward.

I still have a soft spot for the Amiga, but could never find a newer AmigaOne in stock anywhere to buy one or find the hardware to upgrade my four classic Amigas to run the Power PC version of the OS here where I live..

I think Hyperion has done a great job with AmigaOS, but they only have so much access to info and technology that has stayed proprietary to them. The Amiga OS needs to undergo fundamental change to get further along..

Things needed:

Better full gpu support and drivers and hardware support for PCI-E and USB standards. I think Displayport will have a difficult time catching on because HDMI is so popular with TVs..

full multi-user support..

More sound support

Support for multiple cores

the Move to 64-bit CPUs running as a 64 bit OS

Better WIFI support..

Who's CPU it is really doesn't matter anymore, they are fast enough to do anything now.. Intel would keep them riding the curve as new things come out, but in the abscence of that support for newer bus standards and virtualization technologies.

I wish AmigaOS and the platform would move forward but no one seems to think the R&D investment is worth it..

-Don

[stefcep2]

Yet here, on my 7 year old PC with PentiumIV 1.7GHz, 1GB RAM, 32MB graphics (no gpu), XP Pro SP3, Firefox 3 -- there is no such faffing, the menus are fine, they just appear in full form, no appreciable delays, no funny drawing, it's all good. So it doesn't sound like it's either the hardware OR the older OS that is to blame. Maybe you've got yours configured badly?

  No its Vista, the current OS running on current hardware( 2 months old). But I'm sure in 5 years time Vista will fly on that hardware.

[AmigaHeretic]

But a computer runnings Windows is a PC right?  So...

Or maybe it's an "iPC", imPersonal Computer?

[Karlos]

No its Vista, the current OS running on current hardware( 2 months old). But I'm sure in 5 years time Vista will fly on that hardware.

Something has to be wrong there.

My machine is nearly a year old now. Admittedly it was pretty high-spec when I built it but I wanted something that was going to last a while.

intel Q9450 @ 2.66 GHz
intel X48 chipset
4GB DDR3 1600 (running at 1333 but with 7-7-7 latency)
500GB Seagate HDD
XFX GTX260 640MHz version


As I said earlier, I do use Vista (64-bit home premium ed) whenever I want to indulge in a spot of gaming. Admittedly, it's not as responsive as Linux, but I couldn't possibly describe it as slow, not by any stretch of the imagination.

[stefcep2]

Not where I come from, no. A PC running Linux is a PC running Linux ("PC running Linux" and "Linux box" aren't mutually exclusive, you see). As I know it, PC usually refers to the IBM PC compatibles and their current "descendants".

So the whole thing boils down to you grasping for some flawed definition to back your point up. And no, I don't think that Wintel PCs are playing catchup either.


Yes, monolithic system design is the way of the future. Sigh.

I always referred to Windows.  Yes I can get Puppy Linux to fly on an x86 PC.    Thsfact is 95%  of PC user have no idea what Linux even is.  Witness the Ubuntu netbooks that got sent back when people realised its not what they were used to ie Windows.  You're a computer hobbyist, Karlos is an advanced computer user, neither of you are representative of the average computer user.  Most people would have no idea what x86 means.  To most people "PC" means a computer with Windows on it.  And no I've done Linux, its multitasking is worse than Windows and definatley worse than Amiga.

[Karlos]

And no I've done Linux, its multitasking is worse than Windows and definatley worse than Amiga.

Now I know you are having a giraffe. What was it, a version 1 kernel on a 486?