Amiga 10yrs ahead of PC

[Mosaic]

Just a comment...

In 1993 i was using an Commodre Amiga with a Video toaster card and assorted software to do 3D animation and edit video on a NONlinear Personal Animation recorder from DPS systems with a Full frame Time Base Corrector card.

And the GREAT thing about the Amiga was real multiprocessing ...it had an Audio coprocessor ....like the new Nforce dolby Dig mobo's, It had a videocoprocessor and was NATIVE NTSC...no SVga etc...you looked at a NTSC monitor as the computer screen...No aspect ratio probs there!

The software all had hooks with a scripting language REXX ...so all of this frame serving stuff was native to the AMIGA. I could render animated frames to a post processor to do compositing & color correction etc with filters and then pump it to the nonlinear recorder...which would wait until the animation was done and then it would START the rs422 Betacam recorder with deck control and record the animation to the tape.

ALL SCRIPTED with no USER intervention ......shit it could even reboot itself and start from where it left off if there was a power outage.
And all this on a Motorola 68040 25Mhz CPU with no secondary cache....and 16MB total RAM ...sixteen megabytes!!

If u have seen the BWIA airways adverts logo on Travel channel.....thats where it came from!!!

Excuse my rant....but PC's couldn't even do decent audio back then....and Macs were just getting decent Color.

[evilhomer]

I'm amazed you could do all that stuff back in '93. And on a 25mhz no less. Just doesn't make sense that you need a supercomputer (like mine :)) to do that today.

[Hanty]

It's just like the VHS vs. Beta cassette system. Beta were superior in "hardware", but VHS had better marketing.

[diji1]

oh please, what rubbish ... the ST was the true king :D anyway - midi madness. it only would only have taken me 6 years to compress predator ( my current "project" ). oh thats right, im using filters on this one, guess it'll be finished by the time the p3 is out then ! :sly:

Hanty : Beta were superior in "hardware", but VHS had better marketing.

pc won because commodore weren't up to the job.

new "AmigaOS" looks pretty interesting btw.

[Mosaic]

right on the money.....

If Microsoft had boyght Amiga ....well....I think the PC & MAc folks would be the ones out in the cold now.


diji1....I think u missed my point. I never said it was good for rencoding....noprocessor then was good for it....in 1993 there was just Pentium 100's. I am speaking about the relative abilites of a SYSTEM ....with rencoding u just throwing horsepower at the prob.
Not exploiting the intrinsic multiprocessing abilites of a system.

[diji1]

@Mosaic : i know :) ... tongue was pressed tightly into cheek. just a thought ... i remember reading that beta failed not thru marketing but actually as adult films were banned on the format. shame really.

btw, what is the point of this post ? u say "Excuse my rant" but what has it to do with dvd conversion ? it's about 10 years too late to start comparing architectures ...

[Arky]

Originally posted by diji1
btw, what is the point of this post ? u say "Excuse my rant" but what has it to do with dvd conversion ? it's about 10 years too late to start comparing architectures ...

Well, it IS the "General Discussion" forum, and it IS video related, and...

"It's never too late to learn something new!" ;)


Arky ;o)

[diji1]

ur right arky ... im just in a bad mood i guess.

[kvs]

@mosaic

not that it matters, but pentium 100s in 1993?
I forget easily some stuff, but I'm pretty sure
intel hadn't even released a single pentium in
1993. The norm was more likely 386 at best at that
time.. pentium 100.. mm, that probably became
available in 1996 or something.. don't quite
remember, but surely pentium's were NOT
available in 1993.

If you already knew this, sorry. :D

[Mrafrohead]

Pentiums were totally available in 93...;)

Just so ya know;)

The Pentium
Intel brought the PC to the 64-bit level with the Pentium Processor in 1993. It has 3.3 million transistors and performs at 100 million instructions per second(MIPS).

The Pentium family includes the 75/90/100/120/133/150/166/200 clock speeds. It is compatible with all of the older OSes including DOS, Windows 3.1, Unix, and OS/2. Its superscalar design can execute two instructions per clock cycle. The separate caches and the pipelined floating point unit increase its performance beyond the x86 chips. It has SL power management features and has the ability to work as a team with another Pentium. The chip talks over a 64-bit bus to its cards. It has 273 pins that connect it to the motherboard. Internally, though, its really two 32-bit chips chained together that split the work. The chip comes with 16 K of built in cache.

This chip, although fast, gets really hot. So, the use of a CPU fan is required with them. Rather recently, Intel has released more efficient versions of the chip that operate at 3.3 volts, rather than the usual 5 volts. This has reduced the heat some.

Here are some extra little things:

The processor has a burst mode that loads 256-bit chunks of data into the data cache in a single clock cycle. It can transfer data to the memory at up to 528 MB/Sec. Also, Intel took it upon themselves to hardwire several, heavily used commands into the chip. This bypasses the typical microcode library of commands. It also has a built in self test that tests itself upon resetting.


Intel 8086 (1978)
Intel 8088 (1979)
NEC V20 and V30 (1981)
Intel 80186
Intel 80286 or just 286 (1982)
Intel 80386 or just 386 (1988)
Intel 80486 or just 486 (1991)
The Pentium (1993)

[Zhnujm]

if only my old 50MHz 68030 Amiga could play my xvid files...
perfect rgb "tv-out" , no noise ...

[ppera2]

Originally posted by Zhnujm
if only my old 50MHz 68030 Amiga could play my xvid files...
perfect rgb "tv-out" , no noise ...

It is possible to make RGB TV out for PC too...

Noise is not that what makes problems by TV out, but PAL or NTSC encoding and interference.

However, it would be still far worse than pic. on VGA monitor.

[diji1]

this thread is becoming quite interesting now, thank mr afrohead :D ...
wheres the mac-addicts then ? i wanna hear them pooh pooh the rest of the old computers and explain why they were the best ...

[kwag]

Hell, let's go back a little further in time!
Back in 1982 I was programming my Atari 800 in 6502 assembler.
I did many hardware/software projects where I worked with this machine.
Like D/A conversion through the joystick ports. Yes, you heard that right. Controlling external devices in real-time, etc.
Funny thing is that at 1.7Mhz :D the damn machine would perform!
Now we sit in Windowze XP at 2 Giglion hertz :p and wait 5 to 10 seconds while the screen refreshes :devil:
Where is the speed! It looks ( and feels ) like we're going backwards in time! A 2 Ghz PC is exactly 1176.470 times the speed of a 1979 Atari 800!

kwag

[chemmajik]

My Amiga isnt dead yet if I need a title screen its still one of the best when it comes to that without any added cost. But thats all I use it for now, since my 28Mhz accelerator went out on it. :(

[Zhnujm]

oh, i was more thinking about the noise of my pc fans... :D

just wondering why it is so hard to build a good tv-out today. the amiga gfx chip produces the tv-compatible signal by itself and so its a perfect interlaced, overscanned and fully configurable picture wich is perfect for interlaced playback.
is that to much for a 200€ gfx card ?

[kvs]

@mrafrohead
Blah. I stand corrected. Combination of
weak memory and the fact that I didn't get
my first pentium untill long after 1993,
I suppose. But I am starting to realize
now that the P100's did become available
long before 1996, yes. Maybe I should
read some of my old pc mags.. heh.

Still, he claimed p100's to be the norm in
1993 while they were in fact released in
1994. But now I'm just really nitpicking eh.

I claimed p100 became available in 1996, and
well, by then we had the p200.

By 1997, we had the 300MHz p2.. 1998, 450
MHz p2. 1999, 800MHz p3. 2000, 1.5 GHz p4.
2001, 2 GHz p4. Only talking pentiums (intel)
here.. Interesting numbers nontheless.

[ppera2]

Originally posted by kwag

Where is the speed! It looks ( and feels ) like we're going backwards in time! A 2 Ghz PC is exactly 1176.470 times the speed of a 1979 Atari 800!
kwag

This is not correct calculation. New PC CPU's are 32 bit, old Atari, Commodore etc. CPU's were 8 bit. There was not FPU... Actually new CPU's are perhaps 10000 times faster in some aspects.

But it is not only thing what affects speed. Software is too complex today, and it can not be made faster in acceptable time and realibility. It was simple to write 10 KB assembler code and optimize it. Modern OS is made in many layers, what is not good for speed.

I remember that I made floppy disk interface for Sinclair Spectrum. And it worked faster than floppy on Atari ST, which is aprox. 4 times faster machine. Why ? Because ST's TOS was written in C, it used slow system calls for floppy access, while I wrote all for Spectrum in pure Assembler.

And I still have Atari ST and Sinclair Spectrum in working condition, although I use them very rare.

@Zhnujm
buy ATI card if you want good TV out. Even Voodoo had much better TV out than GF cards.

[kwag]

Originally posted by ppera2
[B]

This is not correct calculation. New PC CPU's are 32 bit, old Atari, Commodore etc. CPU's were 8 bit. There was not FPU... Actually new CPU's are perhaps 10000 times faster in some aspects.



Yes and no. I was just measuring on a Mhz per Mhz.
Still, I would like to see ( the impossible! ), a 6502 processor running at 2Ghz. :p
The clock cycle of a 6502 is more efficient than a Pentium ( that requires mode clock cycles per instruction )
So a 6502 is more efficient on a clock per clock basis, compared to the Pentium family. This is what I mean "Going backwards in time"

kwag

[Ookami]

Great thread, all!

Does anyone here uses a emulator instead of the real thing(s)? If so, what are you're experiences?

I use the emus only for playing those old games when I'm in a nostalgic mood (or when I just want to play a good game that doesn't need hundreds of megabytes).

BTW, C=64 + Geos was the real king :D . And when I hear the music of Bubble Bobble on the C=64 I burst into tears... :)

Cheers,

Mijo.

[ppera2]

Originally posted by kwag


The clock cycle of a 6502 is more efficient than a Pentium ( that requires mode clock cycles per instruction )
So a 6502 is more efficient on a clock per clock basis, compared to the Pentium family. This is what I mean "Going backwards in time"

kwag

Hmmm... That's not true, although 6502 was very efficient with simple instructions (and it had only those). New CPU's can execute even 4 or more simple instructions per clock, while 6502 requred minimum 2 clock for 1 instruction.

About emulator speed: I use sometimes Atari ST emulator - Gemulator. It works usually 50-300 times faster, but some graphic ops. are more than 1000 times faster. (In compare to 8 MHz ST). And keep in mind that emulating complete different CPU isn't simple, and is slow.

[diji1]

hi ookami :)

thank you ppera for straightening things out. i actually remember reading on this forum ( a sure sign of correctness ... hehe ) that the p3 acheves the most work per clock cycle than any other microprocessor to date.

ookami : I use the emus only for playing those old games when I'm in a nostalgic mood (or when I just want to play a good game that doesn't need hundreds of megabytes).

i am bit of a ( console ) emu/rom freak as well. :D ... i only use for games tho: atari 2600, nes, snes, n64, neogeo, gba, tg16 and all the arcade boards mainly.... long live "Cabal" and "Blood Bros." ... and "Snow Bros.". ahem. i digress ...

ookami : BTW, C=64 + Geos was the real king . And when I hear the music of Bubble Bobble on the C=64 I burst into tears...

i burst into tears as well when i think of c64. maybe it's thinking of the last ninja series ... or maybes it was because i had a tape drive. i have actually completed a game of tennis ( the real thing(tm) tennis that is ) in a shorter time than it took test drive 3 to load. those were the days ... or they seemed to be at the time anyhow. :D

[kwag]

Originally posted by ppera2


Hmmm... That's not true, although 6502 was very efficient with simple instructions (and it had only those). New CPU's can execute even 4 or more simple instructions per clock, while 6502 requred minimum 2 clock for 1 instruction.



Well, I mentioned Pentium. No P3, P4, G4, etc.
Quote: "The P4 can issue two integer instructions per cycle....."
http://www.arstechnica.com/cpu/01q4/p4andg4e2/p4andg4e2-2.html

That's pretty poor! Considering over 20 years of CPU evolution.

Quote: " * Approximately one instruction per processor clock cycle"
http://www.archivebuilders.com/whitepapers/22016h.html

Again. Sad but true. We're sticked with an old Intel architecture, with roots back to the IBM PC. With very high clock speeds, and very inefficient CPU's. Not to mention I/O bottlenecks.

kwag

[ppera2]

Sorry kwag, here is what you wrote: "A 2 Ghz PC is exactly 1176.470 times the speed of a 1979 Atari 800! kwag "

I don't remember that Pentium worked on 2 GHz....

Must say here that new I86 based CPU's have RISC core. FPU can work parallel with integer unit etc.

About reasons why PC become dominant computer architecture:
In 80-es Microsoft was relatively small firm, 7-th big in one moment for example. Intel was big, IBM was bigger... But PC was too expensive, so people bought rather Sinclairs, Commodores, Ataris etc.

Situation started to change in 90-es, and I think that main reason was mass production of clones in Asia, mostly in Taiwan. Atari and Commodore couldn't stand anymore price war and fast development and went out. Ah... I see now why Lucas choosed that title :D
Only Apple survived, thanx for big tradition, fans and Microsoft...

Must say here that I don't like I86 assembler, 68000 was much better for programming, but I will not say because of it that it is much inferior CPU architecture.

[Hanty]

diji1:

The failure of The Amiga was due to a number of bad market descision by Commodore, it had nothing to do with the hardware.

[diji1]

hanty: i disagree. :D

edit : i disagree with the hardware part ...

[Mosaic]

I have used commodore hardware since 1983......and for the time their hardware was superior to most.

Remember the c-64 had 16 animatable HARDWARE SPRITES and a SID programmable music CHip that wowed everbody.

Anyway Let's not forget ULtima 4 in 1985 on the C64 ....man that was aweome. I still play that game now and then on the Frodo emulator on the PC....and its identical.

Further to this....I know the hardware intimately as I published 2 OS upgrades for the C-64 in 1990 and 1993 in Compute!s Gazette.

When i started my 3D animation Biz ....ONLY the AMIGA could do it as a desktop I did not have $100,000 to buy a Silicon Gfx workstation. And Lightwave 3D was the best bang for the buck...only on Amiga then as well.

For $10,000.00 i got an Amy 4000 -16MB RAM 68040-25Mhz - video toaster 4000, DPS TBCIV - DPS PAR and a panasonic SVHS prof. recorder. Did not have the money for Betacam SP so I used to Transport the AMY to a Production House for EVERY job to dump to broadcast tape.

BTW the AMY used ISA slots.

THERE WAS NO DESKTOP IN THE WORLD that could do broadcast animation/compositing and titling except the Amiga. This was so simply because Commodore built the Amiga on NTSC ...like the C64/128 ....everybody else went proprietary video ...for proprietary money. Also...PC/Mac's back then were just figuring out that audio was more than beeps and buzzes and Commodore had SID audio since 1982.....PC's didn't get audio like that until the soundblaster in 1990 or so. And the 8 bit SB was noisy as hell.

BTW my AMy hardly ever had an OS crash .....maybe if i had an Amy running at 2 Ghz and an FPU I would be more productive than on unstable windows.

[diji1]

ok, so i study more the programming / it side of things and can't claim to have much experience with old machines / personal computers _except_ from a gaming perspective. that said :

... so first ...

Hanty : The failure of The Amiga was due to a number of bad market descision by Commodore, it had nothing to do with the hardware.

...but ...

ppera : Atari and Commodore couldn't stand anymore price war and fast development and went out.

so i think basically the hardware just didn't manage to keep up and became too expensive, plain and simple. people can rave on as much as they like about 20 year old designs and whatnot but it doesnt seem to matter. as a trend everything is being offloaded from the cpu anyhow ...

i can remember high school years ( 1991 ? 1993 ? ) being blown away by my first glimpse of a genre i follow as a staple diet these days - the FPS. wolfenstein at the time made me realise that the pc was going to overtake my amiga . no competition.

Mosaic : For $10,000.00 i got an Amy 4000 -16MB RAM 68040-25Mhz - video toaster 4000, DPS TBCIV - DPS PAR and a panasonic SVHS prof. recorder. Did not have the money for Betacam SP so I used to Transport the AMY to a Production House for EVERY job to dump to broadcast tape.

rotfl. now that is available to everyone at a fraction of the price :).

Mosiac : BTW the AMY used ISA slots.

hehe ...

Mosiac : BTW my AMy hardly ever had an OS crash .....maybe if i had an Amy running at 2 Ghz and an FPU I would be more productive than on unstable windows.

ahem. my pc never crash. :)

[ppera2]

Yeah, I remember that people started to buy PC's to play Doom.
It was 386-40 MHz ere. Motorola was at 32 MHz, if I remember well, but it was (and is) too expensive. So, textures killed Atari and Commodore :D .

Atari Falcon had MC 68030 at 16 MHz, but used only 16 bit data bus, what was economic, but degraded performance significantly.

[kwag]

Originally posted by ppera2

Must say here that I don't like I86 assembler, 68000 was much better for programming, but I will not say because of it that it is much inferior CPU architecture. [/B]

I know what you mean!. Hell, I think I had more fun programming the Atari 800 than a x86! It was really getting down to bare metal with limited resources. And believe me, I did a lot of stuff with Atari assembler and FORTH, in only a couple of KB's :D
I even remember the classic "Space Invaders" arcade game. I believe the original game was coded in FORTH, and it was only an 8KB ROM!
Now programmers write a "Hello World" in Visual Junk++ and the file size is 2MB+ :rolleyes: It's sad. :confused:

kwag

[Hanty]

diji1:

That ties in with the bad descisions I mentioned on Commodores part, they hardly had any R&D that could provide solutions for cheaper and better hardware. They lost a race to the pure CPU power of PC to make it short.

[chemmajik]

Doom started to have its impact, but it was when the Voodoo1 started running on Quake that it clinched it for me.. I own a Ham-E for my Amiga500 that gave it 256,000 colors, but it was limited to lowres except when using Imagemaster, then the Voodoo1 came along with 16bit but at hires I was like man I got to have this, the rest was history. Just think Motorola had a once in a life time chance to be number one but they blew it by dropping future support of the 680XX series line. The Amiga audio needed upgrading to 16bit, the graphics needed 16-24bit. Expansion boards to allow it where just to expensive...

[orionware]

The Amiga toaster for editing just plain rocked.

I still have my 2500HD and it fires up just dandy.

68030
60 MEG HD (Yes MEG!)
2 Meg Fat Agnes
8 Meg Ram

Have to break it out to play some old skool Zak McKraken :)

[midiguy]

damn are you guys like 80 years old or something? The ATARI??? the AMIGA??? I was born in 1986, sorry for my ignorance.

[avih]

you don't have to be "sorry of your ignorance", but u did miss a great deal of fun with all those 'independant' computers of the 80's ;). i'm 31, and been using the spectrum since '83 (many versions), and atari-st since '87 (iirc). these were the days when u said 'my brand is better than yours' as in spectrum vs commodore. all you can say now is 'my board is better' ;)

cheers
avi

[smok3]

poor amiga :(

i cry for:
adpro, imagefx, real3d, yam, rexx, ced... (it was a 68040/25 with some serious scsi drives for that time - 2gigs or something, had 12 meg fastram, 2 meg chip, cant forget the 24 bit piccaso board of course.)

i dont cry about:
web, browsers :P

no really, i mis HER.

btw: what was faster, anim7 or anim8 format? :D