Amiga vs PC

[save2600]

Motorola 68040 ~ 27.5 MIPS at 25 MHz
Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition i980EE ~ 147,600 MIPS at 3.3 GHz

That's 5367 times the power of an A4000.

Too bad all that power is wasted on Windoze and modern computing in general     And the internet, Adobe products, flash, ad banners, pop-ups, spyware, virus protectors, etc. being what they are today - todays boxes sure don't "feel" all that more powerful. Just bought the latest and greatest computer. Great... now all the crap I don't want to be bothered with in the first place, works that much quicker. Yay. lol

This new job of mine has me working with Windoze 7, Office apps, IE and more. Having ditched the PC world shortly after ME came out, I gotta say... Windows & M$ products *still* suck. Some of the least intuitive and just plain ugly looking garbage to ever grace computing. Blech. Even my company's interweb e-mail looks better and responds quicker through Safari on my Mac. I won't even get into how buggy & clunky their proprietary card reading/Retail POS system software is - all modeled around what looks to be a Windows for Workgroups GUI.

[runequester]

Maybe from spectrum users? :lol:

and they both hate on the dude with the atari 400

[smerf]

Having read through every post here, it seems to me we should not be debating or arguing over silly little things like gfx card speeds/ flash drives are better than HDs and so on.

We should instead just be saying why we use our Amiga / PC / Mac or whatever machine your using, for what we as individuals use them for and how we are happy with the machines we use...

For example I use my Amiga for all my computing needs except for one, I use my iMac for the internet only and it's more than adequate in that task for me.

My Amiga however, I use for all other computing needs I have ie: GFX/Photo Editing, Programming, audio editing, creating MP3s and music CDs / burning Video DVDs, letters, printing and a whole lot more beside.

This set up for me is just about perfect, only when I finally set up one of my Amigas to go online, will I then be able to decide whether my Amiga is suitable for this one final task or if I shall have to continue using the Mac for being online.

So come one folks be a bit more positive about why you use the machine you do, and share with us all, the benefits of using your particular set up.

Hi,

I use my Amiga to keep hold of all my important data, pictures, music, documents, insurance stuff, etc. My Amiga 4000 has been doing it all with old antiquated programs like pen pal, Miamiga file, word perfect, and Final Writer. Things I don't use the Amiga for is guess what, can you spell internet.

but

I have never lost any data on my Amiga 4000 since I bought it in 1992. (heh, heh one of the benefits of being a Commodore salesmen back then).

Look if I didn't think that the Amiga was the best thing since salted peanuts, I wouldn't of sold it and yes I did own PC's back then, I had an Otrana portable, a PC-10, PC-20, and a C128 (a very enjoyable computer). Never owned a MAC because it seemed like such a dead piece of locked up system and hardware piece of crap.

Anyhow when you compare an Amiga with a PC think of the most important thing you keep on your PC, and that is data. I have a new quadcore, screaming gamming machine, and you know what, it is a miracle when I complete a game, because the darn computer keeps either locking up, getting infected, or just plain crashes. I find myself reloading about every 6 months. Can any of you mighty mouth PC owners tell me everything that is running on your PC? Can you tell me if your registery is completely clean? Can you tell me when you are on the internet who is lurking in the background? Can you tell me what files belong where and if they are really part of the Winblows os?

Probably not, I have several years of administrative training, and sometime it take me and several other people to solve a problem.

smerf

[Karlos]

So if computing power doubles every 18 months, and the A4000 was circa 1992, do you feel that your 2010 PC gives you the power of 2^12 (ie 4096) A4000's working at the same time?

Well, I built this PC in 2008. Core2 Quad is old news now, all the real hardcore PC enthusiasts are on i7 or better.

That said, depending on the benchmark, it can be a lot more than 4096x faster.

My 040, which is the same speed as those found in the A4000/40 (only without the crippled memory interface) manages about 5-7 MFLOPS in most amiga CPU benchmarks. In real code that I've written (a hand-optimised all-pairs solver for spacing an arbitrary number (read hundreds to thousands) of vertices in a spherical shell such that they are all as far apart as possible), that processor managed the equivalent of about 2MFLOPS, which is a very respectable outcome given the fact that a lot of memory read/write is also required. The unusually stressful nature of the work meant that unless the process was run at a low priority, the machine would freeze until an iteration was complete.

A vanilla, non-threaded version for linux on my PC ran around 400MFLOPS. Of course, that's not really making best use of it, since there are 4 cores. A threaded version (using pthread), compiled for SSE3 reached about 1.2GFLOPS. I suspect it could go higher, with hand-optimised SSE3 vector operations, but I don't really know enough SSE3 assembler to write it.

Again, though, that's not the best utilisation of the machine as a whole. Far and away the fastest version I've built reached ~450GFLOPS via the GPU when the number of vertices to solve for was 30,720 (number of streaming multiprocessors * maximum threads per multiprocessor). That's a speedup of 375x the threaded CPU version and 225,000x compared to the single-thread 040 version.

Suffice to say, the GPU is the coolest coprocessor I've ever toyed with

[Karlos]

Motorola 68040 ~ 27.5 MIPS at 25 MHz
Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition i980EE ~ 147,600 MIPS at 3.3 GHz

That's 5367 times the power of an A4000.

I've never seen a 68040 manage more than 1 instruction per cycle sustained. Of the 4 68040's I have at my disposal, none of them manage more than 0.8MIPS/MHz on the various benchmarking tools I've used. The 27.5MIPS figure looks far more like a 33MHz part to me. Which benchmark was this?

[runequester]

Hi,

I use my Amiga to keep hold of all my important data, pictures, music, documents, insurance stuff, etc. My Amiga 4000 has been doing it all with old antiquated programs like pen pal, Miamiga file, word perfect, and Final Writer. Things I don't use the Amiga for is guess what, can you spell internet.

but

I have never lost any data on my Amiga 4000 since I bought it in 1992. (heh, heh one of the benefits of being a Commodore salesmen back then).

Look if I didn't think that the Amiga was the best thing since salted peanuts, I wouldn't of sold it and yes I did own PC's back then, I had an Otrana portable, a PC-10, PC-20, and a C128 (a very enjoyable computer). Never owned a MAC because it seemed like such a dead piece of locked up system and hardware piece of crap.

Anyhow when you compare an Amiga with a PC think of the most important thing you keep on your PC, and that is data. I have a new quadcore, screaming gamming machine, and you know what, it is a miracle when I complete a game, because the darn computer keeps either locking up, getting infected, or just plain crashes. I find myself reloading about every 6 months. Can any of you mighty mouth PC owners tell me everything that is running on your PC? Can you tell me if your registery is completely clean? Can you tell me when you are on the internet who is lurking in the background? Can you tell me what files belong where and if they are really part of the Winblows os?

Probably not, I have several years of administrative training, and sometime it take me and several other people to solve a problem.

smerf

Friends don't let friends use windows

[mongo]

I've never seen a 68040 manage more than 1 instruction per cycle sustained. Of the 4 68040's I have at my disposal, none of them manage more than 0.8MIPS/MHz on the various benchmarking tools I've used. The 27.5MIPS figure looks far more like a 33MHz part to me. Which benchmark was this?

Freescale claims 44 MIPS @ 40 MHz. Who am I to argue?

[cecilia]

I belive Amiga has a soul.  

I have unending love towards Amiga.

PC lost its soul long time ago :smack:

yes, the amiga has a soul

I can't measure this, but I have always Felt it.

even though I have to sometimes use Windows 7, I still find it annoying. it may be "better" than some other windoze OS's, but they ALL have something obnoxious about them.

linux is way more fun than windoze. that's why i HAVE to have a multi-boot system. I just couldn't live with only one OS

[stefcep2]

Motorola 68040 ~ 27.5 MIPS at 25 MHz
Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition i980EE ~ 147,600 MIPS at 3.3 GHz

That's 5367 times the power of an A4000.

benchmarks don't reveal true performance.  I wonder if you could render a Lightwave animation in 1/4096th of the time?

[Karlos]

benchmarks don't reveal true performance.  I wonder if you could render a Lightwave animation in 1/4096th of the time?

I take it you haven't seen some of the recent developments in lightwave 10? It has a realtime "Viewport Preview Render" mode. For some examples, see here.

How long do you think it would take an A4000 based toaster to render this?


Of course, there probably wouldn't be a lightwave 10 without the Amiga trailblazing the earliest versions

[B00tDisk]

No, you misunderstood the post.  I admitted even 64-bit processors can run older 16-bit stuff but the OS doesn't allow.  Similarly, DOSBOX runs DOS stuff fine but it won't run Windows 3.x stuff.  I.e., it doesn't have the required windows files.

YES.

YES IT CAN.

[Karlos]

Freescale claims 44 MIPS @ 40 MHz. Who am I to argue?

As with most claims by the manufacturer (intel included), this is probably a best case scenario for a cache hit (no latencies) case and without dependencies on still executing instructions (no stalls), register only arguments (no memory IO). Real code invariably doesn't behave like that.

[Karlos]

Similarly, DOSBOX runs DOS stuff fine but it won't run Windows 3.x stuff.  I.e., it doesn't have the required windows files.

When you say it "won't run", you are giving the false impression that it "can't run". It doesn't do it out of the box since including windows 3.1 with it would get the authors nailed up in Ballmer's trophy room quicker than you could say "developers" four times.

However, you can install windows 3.x on DosBOX, provided you have a copy of it that is still readable after all these years

Why anybody would want to, of course, is another matter.

[Karlos]

Friends don't let friends use windows

I've made the case for open source alternatives to friends that have nothing but pain with Windows day after day. Yet, despite not actually doing anything with their machines that really needs it, they seem unduly resistant to the idea. I guess they have a masochistic streak

Anyway, back on topic, we all know the Amiga was better back when it actually counted; in the days of genuine home computing. That era has gone. People may actually do more stuff with their computers nowadays, but precious little of it is what I'd call computing. Farting about on farcebook and the like seems to be what it has all come down to for many people today.

[Seiya]

amiga vs pc here

RetroPlayer

http://www.amigapage.it/index.php?pl=intro

[runequester]

I've made the case for open source alternatives to friends that have nothing but pain with Windows day after day. Yet, despite not actually doing anything with their machines that really needs it, they seem unduly resistant to the idea. I guess they have a masochistic streak
 
Anyway, back on topic, we all know the Amiga was better back when it actually counted; in the days of genuine home computing. That era has gone. People may actually do more stuff with their computers nowadays, but precious little of it is what I'd call computing. Farting about on farcebook and the like seems to be what it has all come down to for many people today.

Out of curiosity,what do you consider "computing" ?
 
Ive been meaning to open some sort of thread about this, but I guess this is as good as any.