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- From: kathomas@nyx.cs.du.edu (Karl Thomas)
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy,comp.sys.amiga.games,comp.sys.amiga.misc
- Subject: Re: Why are europeans dumb enough to buy amigas?
- Date: 11 Apr 1996 12:34:27 -0600
- Organization: University of Denver, Math/CS Dept.
- Message-ID: <4kjjbj$r40@nyx.cs.du.edu>
- References: <316328a1.113870448@news.onramp.net> <2213.6673T854T1189@ak.planet.gen.nz> <4kf3n1$rim@nyx.cs.du.edu> <4kgm7f$fb9@fbi-news.Informatik.Uni-Dortmund.DE> <4khvsi$isb@daily-planet.nodak.edu> <ibl-juwa.459.000EE0EB@wiso.wiso.uni-dortmund.de>
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-
- ibl-juwa@wiso.wiso.uni-dortmund.de (Juergen Wahlmann) writes:
-
- >In article <4khvsi$isb@daily-planet.nodak.edu> nahender@prairie.NoDak.edu (Nathanael J Henderson) writes:
- >>From: nahender@prairie.NoDak.edu (Nathanael J Henderson)
- >>Subject: Re: Why are europeans dumb enough to buy amigas?
- >>Date: 11 Apr 1996 03:56:02 GMT
-
- >>Juergen Wahlmann (pg262) (wahlmann@banach.informatik.uni-dortmund.de) wrote:
- >>: |> and pretty damn slowly...
-
- >>: What are you talking about? It's even faster than the equal powered Mac.
-
- Post some Speedometer benchmarks. The only thing that is faster on the
- ShapeShifter or Emplant than on an equivalent Mac is the fp. Making
- the floating point faster is a simple hack - just reduce the accuracy a
- few places. But you'll find that a stock Amiga emulating a Mac will be
- significantly slower in anything involving graphics.
-
- >> Perhaps, but the average Mac is much faster than the average Amiga.
- >>How they would rate if the hardware platform were equally fast is
- >>irrelivent--they aren't.
-
- >Even PowerMacs come to a crawl if the 68k emulation is used.
-
- Using SpeedDoubler on my 6100/60 without an l2 cache (the slowest P-Mac
- configuration that was ever sold and has been discontinued for over a
- year), the 6100/60 is faster than the fastest 68K Mac that was ever sold
- (the 840av) on many tests. But with all the major applications already
- native, who is actually using a lot of 68K applications on a P-Mac??
-
- > 'Til Copland a
- >good part of the OS is still 68k.
-
- That's true. But if you program the Mac you'll find that around 90% of
- the time that a native application spends calling OS routines, it
- will spend calling about 20% of the Toolbox functions. According to
- major developers you'll see about a 20% speed increase in the typical
- application by making the rest of the OS native.
-
- > I've used a PowerMac once and the only
- >impressing part of it was how incredibly fast it was rendering game frames.
-
- What else did you use it for? You already said that the graphics were
- reasonably fast. What parts of the machine did you notice that
- were slow?
-
-
- >> Waste some space perhaps, but save a lot of time pissing around over
- >>such trivial matters. Hard drive space is dirt cheap. Making smaller
- >>programs might appeal to your sense of aesthetics, but in the real world
- >>a couple meg or even 50-100 Meg isn't that big a deal. $25 of hard drive
- >>space on a $3,000 system to run $300-$500 programs? Nobody is going to
- >>lose any sleep over that.
-
- >Bad enough. Wasting space on HD and main memory also increases loading time of
- >OS and apps, and is of course an indication of less quality software.
-
- No application loads completely into memory at one time. Even MS programs
- only load the modules you use. The biggest app I have is CodeWarrior but
- with all of the compilers it comes with its well worth the hard drive space.
-
- >>: Why the hell do PC/Mac advocates give so much on benchmarks?
-
- >> Because it's such a convenient angle to attack the Amiga with, since
- >>the scores inevitably fall in favor of the PC/Mac. :-) I suppose a big
- >>part of it is also that PC vs PC and Mac vs Mac benchmark scores are so
- >>common and usefull that people automatically adopt them as a quick
- >>measurement of all platforms, for better or worse.
-
- >More for worse I think. These benchmarks say absolutly nothing about the
- >usefulness of a system. It's all marketing hype.
-
- You're right. The usefulness of the system mostly comes from the speed,
- graphics capability, sound capability, and the application availability.
- Either way the Amiga looses.
-
- >>: Processing power is not the one and only thing with
- >a computer system.
-
- >> True, much as financial stability isn't the ONLY thing about a bank.
- >>But it's a darn big thing. :-)
-
- >Ah, I would love to see AmigaOS running on such a powerful machine like a
- >PowerMac, perhaps with some decent custom chip enhancements. :-)
-
- Why? The Amiga ran slower than the Mac when they were both running on 68K
- machines.
-