From: tarquin@athena.mit.edu (Robert P Poole)
Subject: Re: Considering switching to IBM
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 00:27:38 GMT


Nish Patel [nap42487@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu] writes some rather amusing things:

>First, when the person who first started this with his
>thought of switching to IBM posted something about the Amiga, it did not sound
>too fast. He had the Amiga in 16 color mode, and his downloading in the
>background could not go fast enough to do something as small as downloading
>when he used the Workbench to open a drawer or move something. A Windows
>machine would never go that slow (and it is in 16 colors, with a lot more
>Graphics than the plain and boring -looking Workbench.

MS Windows is more "graphical" than Workbench?  Oh, right, you can put
background wallpaper on the screen in Windows.  Hah...  Sorry to burst
someone's bubble here, but Windows is absolutely HORRID -- it takes reasonably
fast processors like the 386 and 486 and slows them down to a crawl.  All of
this is not because Windows is necessarily *that* CPU intensive -- it's because
the ISA architecture which still prevails in the clone market has a horrid data
bottleneck, which really shows when doing bus-intensive stuff like TELLING THE
VGA CARD WHAT GOES WHERE.

A graphics coprocessor/accelerator card will alleviate some of this problem.
Using a real bus architecture like EISA or MCA will help also, but then, you
have to get a graphics card that will take advantage of the new bus.

>The really sad thing about this is this guy had a 68040 accelerator!!!! He
>also tested multitasking with a 25 MHz 486 and it was only slightly slower
>than his 68040 accelerated Amiga. The 25 MHz 486 is only about 76 percent  as
>fast as a 68040 at 25 MHz as far as raw  speed goes, in executing
>instructions. (The 25 MHz 486 will still beat the 040 in most identical
>application tasks because of it's superior instruction set. This is another
>advantage of Intel processor based computers over Amigas.) And if he used a
>faster OS, like the new OS/2 2.0, he will see a bigger performance boost in
>multitasking.

All 68040 accelerators are not created equal.  But aside from that...

The 486 has a superior instruction set to the 68040?  Dream ON!  At least
Motorola is making the effort to reduce the number of clock cycles for the most
frequently used instructions on the 680x0 chips...  And the architecture of the
680x0 chips is MUCH cleaner than the internal architecture on the 80x86 chips.
The Intel chipset is, by necessity, one huge kludge because they need to keep
hacking on new features and support them with YET MORE crappy microcode.  Hell,
why do you think AMD does such a good job reverse-engineering Intel
microprocessors and actually IMPROVING on them in the process?  It's not that
hard!

But the funniest thing so far is the claim that OS/2 2.0 is a "fast" OS, and
superior to Workbench...

Well...  I have a friend who worked for IBM in an internship program (yes, this
`friend' is real, not a figment of my imagination -- name is withheld for
obvious reasons) who owns an Amiga 3000 and also was involved in the OS/2 2.0
project.  (No, IBM did not like the fact that he kept bringing his A3000 into
work to show it off... but anyway...)  In his words, "OS/2 2.0 is nice, but
it's not an Amiga."  He claims that OS/2 2.0 is a "real" OS, but slow compared
to the Amiga.  He blames much of the performance loss on the fact that the IBM
architecture lacks the custom chipset that the Amiga has, and various other
reasons.  Most importantly, there are key areas where the Amiga clearly
outshines an IBM or clone machine running OS/2, no question about it.  OS/2
multimedia is clearly in its infancy at best...

Bah, is this even worth my aggravation?  Probably not...

--
Robert P. Poole                       tarquin@athena.mit.edu
46 Massachusetts Avenue               MIT Course VIII
311C Bexley Hall                      "I feel like a lost sock in the
Cambridge, MA  02139                   laundromat of oblivion."