#No 68060?
Interesting thing about the Warp, Steve. It seems a lot of the Warp's
advantage in speed is that is has its own memory bus and beats the Amiga 4000's
usual slow memory access by a lot. I checked FractalPro on the Warp40mhz and
found it was exactly 1.6 times as fast as a stock A4000/040 (exactly the ratio
of the clock speeds). Interestingly, FractalPro is assembly language with all
the fractal calculation routines tighly coded to run entirely within the cache
so the Warp's apparent advantage on other software boils down to only a clock
speed advantage for efficient software. The Warp40mhz is a great product but
it doesn't do anything magical except reveal how much faster most software
could be if the critical calculation parts were written in assembler instead of
high level languages
If programmers took the trouble to optimize and tighten up their
calculation-intensive programs, we'd get more of a performance boost from a
software revision than from a Warp! I'm also a speed demon so every increase
in clock speed is important to me, too. But I'm not relying on faster
processors or better memory access to cover a multitude of programming sins.
Better programming would give everyone a big speed boost without having to rely
on expensive new hardware. The 060 will bring a real new performance increase
in excess of the clock speed increase to 50mhz so I'm definitely looking
forward to seeing FractalPro on the 060!