CompuServe Messages

*** DISCLAIMER *** I am not a PC fan, but I do serious computer work for a living and keep up with PC through high end workstations. Do not take the below as "supporting" a PC! <grin> > The pentium MAY be better than an 060 at raw processing power. But at some > time you have to put it into a real application. Even with a good motherboard > design you still have to put a pentium onto an IBM-PC compatible motherboard, > and the pentium still has to go through hoops with it's instruction set. IBM motherboards are getting pretty nice now. No more hardware 640K restrictions, etc. They also have the benefit of 1000:1 ratio against the Amiga in volume so they can get huge discounts on parts. Do not confuse a "solid" modern PC with the PC's which were out when the Amiga was at it's peak. Times have changed. These machines have high speed caches, wide memory buses, accelerated video, etc. > The 68000 is better code than 8086, needing more instructions on the 8086 than > the 68000. It might be quicker for a pentium to load a value into a reqister, > but with the restricted number of registers you have to keep pushing and > poping them off the stack. Very true. This is why the PowerPC is better than the '060, because it has twice the number of registers again, and they are ALL general purpose, unlike the '060 where you have an 8/8 split. On the other hand, the Pentium has a huge amount of logic thrown at it to help brute force make up for this lack of registers. Instructions can sometimes be shorter (often 1 byte vs 2 for the '060), and the external bus is 64 bits vs 32 bits. This means when both CPU's have a cache miss, which is often, the Pentium can get twice as much data per cycle as the '060. This is a MAJOR factor. Also, the P6 has a good compromise on the limited number of registers. They do what the PowerPC does and "Register rename". Tprogramer only sees a few register but there are really many more and the hardware will shuffle between them to allow more instructions to execute in parallel that normally could not because they would fight over the same registers. Going the other way, the Pentium can't execute an FP and integer instruction in the same cycle, while the '060 can. > Windows is slower than AmigaOS. Always was always will be. NT is even more of > a hog. Windows is a pig. They are throwing faster and faster CPU's at it. As they get quicker Windows gets quicker. This shows no sign of ever slowing. Amiga DOS, while wonderful, is not ending up on faster CPUs' so it stagnates. The '060 is the end of the road. Moto is just not pushing it. So no matter how "clean" it is, Windows will eventually brute force it's way past it in time. Not fair to compare to NT. NT does MUCH more than Amiga DOS does. ie, full memory protection, multi-user security, etc. It's a pig, but it's core archetecture is rather nice. Oh well. Could be worse, could be raining. —- Andrew Carol