#How Dead Is it?
10 messages in this thread
The reviews I read of CBM UNIX in the UNIX magazines complained that it
was too SLOOOW on the '030 3000. The same review had '040 machines in it
that were acceptable from a speed standpoint.
I saw a demo of Amiga UNIX and thought it was too sluggish to even
consider.
If they made it run on a 4000 and priced the bundle correctly, I bet
they'd sell a lot of machines.
-J
I think the answer to why they didn't make it run on the '040
was that the "base" software from AT&T has mucho assembly code
which uses addressing modes not supported by the '040. That
was the word I got from a Commodore rep at WOA 2 years ago.
They probably didn't want to invest in the development effort
to make it work.
-Jay Pedersen
Now that's an interesting statement. "Addressing modes not supported by
the '040". If anything, this was probably an interpretation of MMU
granularity/instructions or things having to do with the cache.
About the addressing modes. The story I was told by the Commodore
rep at WOA (in 1991) was exactly that. He said that the 040 does
not support the same addressing modes as the 030. And some of
the addressing modes in the assembly code in Unix used addressing
modes no longer supported by the 040.
I do not program assembly on either the 030 or the 040 so I can't
verify the veracity of his statement.
-Jay Pedersen
… Pulling out my 040 book … Seems like the only things that the 040
did was to eliminate some of the math functions of the 881 and change the
MMU capabilities. All of the addressing modes appear to be there (and you
would expect that). Seems like the person who was spouting the line
didn't know the difference between addressing modes and instructions. (Of
couse, I COULD be misreading this 040 book :-).
Jay;
The X server does run pretty slow on the A3000UX. Otherwise though, from
what I have seen the machine is plenty fast.
-bill
C='s UNIX too slow? You know, *Sun's* XWindow isn't all that fast either. The
window setup time and refreshes were almost painful on a SPARC 1+ or ELC. Going
from the Sunview GUI to XWindow was hard to call an advance.
Rob,
But then again, you've gotta remember that SUN's Openview or XWindow will give
ya much better resolution than the Amiga.
Also, I've seen a 64 bit bus on the SUN. – Dave
The fastest XWin I've ever seen was Dale Luck's A500 running X Client off a
Sun3. Yes, it was mono, but it was FAST!
Rob,
An A500 running off a Sun3??? Jeesh, THAT musta been a long time ago…
<grin>
– Dave