From: rengang@cs.mcgill.ca (Rengang YANG)
Subject: Re: HELP--AMIGA OR IBM PC CLONE?
Organization: SOCS - McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 16:43:44 GMT

In article <1993Jan10.220842.23518@ra.msstate.edu> skip@tacky.cs.olemiss.edu (Skip Sauls) writes:
>In article <C0nMw8.326@undergrad.math.waterloo.edu> papresco@cantor.math.uwaterloo.ca (Paul Prescod) writes:
>>>As an owner of an A4000 who uses very nice SVGA systems at work, I can say
>>>that AGA certainly does cut it.  Commodore wanted to upgrade the custom
>>>chips to SVGA levels, and they have done so with AGA.  
>>
>>What do you define as "SVGA."  Trident SVGA is about equivalent to AGA.
>>It's also about $50.00.
>
>That's just it, there is no SVGA standard.  There are so many different
>chips that supporting all of them can be difficult.  VESA attempts to 
>provide a standard, but it is usually very slow and isn't guaranteed to
>work on all systems.  

   Not having a strict standard on the hardware is not as much
   problem as you might imagine. Everyone who use compatibles
   (or most of them) will admit that they have or will switch
   from MSDOS environment to Windows/OS2/whatever, and since
   all of these provides device independent drivers, all software
   will work fine, as long as you have the driver. This is not true
   with the Amiga.

>
>SVGA is equivalent in terms of resolution, but it lacks the flexibility
>of AGA.  Here's a little comparison of my A4000 versus my ET4000 486-50

   I used to have fully loaded A2000, used it for 3 years, then sold it.
   I'm wondering if the refresh rate has changed at all with those
   higher resolution screens. For example, it seems AGA can handle
   800x600, what is it's refresh rate?

>at work:
>
>                            AGA                      SVGA
>
>memory                      2M                       1-2M
>palette                     24 bit                   18/24 bit
>max colors:
>            320x200         256/HAM8                 256
>            640x480         256/HAM8                 256/32k/64k/24bit
>            800x600         256/HAM8                 256/32k/64k
>           1024x768         --------                 256
>           1280x512         256/HAM8                 ---
>           1280x768         --------                  16
># sprites                     8                        0
>15kHz support               yes                      no
>31kHz support               yes                      yes
>overscan support            yes                      no
>NTSC support                yes                      no
>PAL support                 yes                      no
>genlock support             yes                      no
>multi-res support           yes                      no
>graphics bus                16 bit direct            16 bit ISA
>video bus                   64 bit direct            16 bit VRAM
>bandwidth                   ~7M/sec                  ~3M/sec
>bit-blitting                custom chip              CPU driven
>line-drawing                custom chip              CPU driven
>video-effects               custom chip              CPU driven (if possible)
>
>When I find the time, I'll port some of the code I've written for the
>Clone to the Amiga and see how they compare.  The Clone is a 486DX-50
>with 256k cache, 16M, and 500M HD, but the poor beast has been saddled
>with the pathetic ISA bus.  Using brute-force and single-tasking, I'd
>expect it to be able to keep up with the A4000 for some operations.
>

   If you are comparing A4000 with Gateways2000 system, then wouldn't
   it be fair to compare with accerated card, NOT a standard SVGA card
   with 24bit display? Most of the compatible systems I see in the
   mags come with one accelerated card or another. And as I meantioned
   before, the fact that all of these card use different graphics 
   processors is not that important - what's more important is having
   a nice bug-free drivers.
   If you compare AGA with cards built from Mach32(in Gateways system),
   or S3801(very cheap, and fast!), or S3928 or Weitech 9000(?) or ....
   you will find that it doesn't compare. Of course if you are looking
   for video releated work, AGA is the choice. 

>>>So, the Gateway's CPU should come close to the speed of the 33MHz 040, 
>>>unless you need to do a lot of floating point.
>>
>>Give me a BREAK.  What total CRAP.  A 66MHZ 486DX is "close" to the
>>speed of a 33MHZ 040, unless you have to do floating poing.   Come
>>on...what colour is the sky in your world?
>
>It is not a DX, it is a DX2, which uses Intel's clock-doubling scam.
>If Motorola had better marketing folks and if the people who buy the
>Motorola machines were as ignorant as those who buy Intel machines,
>the could have called the 040-25 a 50Mhz chip.  The motherboard of the
>Gateway is only running at 33MHz, not the full 66MHz, and the machines
>are not much faster than the regular 33MHz models.  For some operations,
>the 50MHz DX machines are faster than the kludged 66Mhz models.
>

   Why is DX2 a kludge? Try to think only in terms of technical merits/
   deficiencies, ignore the marketing for now. In many cases, the
   internal 8k cache in 486 achieves somewhere in the neighbourhood of
   80-90% hit ratio. Everyone agrees that having cache helps to any fast
   CPU. And IF that hit ratio stays up there reasonably high even after
   raising the clock speed by x2, why not do it? In fact, this works
   well, and in average case, you DO get 80% speed up or so, sometimes
   more (with little dinky benchmark programs), or sometimes less
   (highly I/O related work). And yes, I do admit that in very very rare
   case, DX2-66 will approach to that of DX-33. But then again, any CPU
   with cache can sometimes have hit ratio 0% and crawl! :)
   Now to the marketting. I agree that "Overdrive" and 487SX was pretty
   bad and was a ripoff to the consumers. But builing DX2 right into
   motherboard is not.

>>If you want to talk about overall system performance, do so, but if
>>you are talking about CPU speed, then this comparison is a bad joke.
>
>Okay, my A4000 is faster than my 486 at work in overall system performance.
>As for the CPU speed, perhaps you need to learn a bit more about the scam
>which Intel has pulled regarding the DX2 chips.
>

   Feels faster, probably because of that SVGA card you had at work.
   I'd like to see how you think after trying out any of the graphics 
   accelerated systems.

>>>  The A4000 could have been
>>>faster with a better memory system, but 33MHz would also be nice.  As for
>>>memory, you'll certainly need at least 8M for the Gateway, while 6M is
>>>plenty for most apps on the Amiga.
>>
>>That's assuming of course you can FIND applications that do what you
>>want for the the Amiga.
>
>I have a word processor, a paint program, 2 image processing packages with
>morphing capabilities, a "multimedia" authoring system, HD backup software, 
>audio tools, a compiler, networking software, various viewers and players,
>several system tools and utilities, and much more.  It does everything that
>I need and I find the Amiga much more pleasant than the 486 I have at work,
>which is better equipped than what most Clone owners use.
>

   Well it depends. I believe that people adjust according to what their
   computers are capable of. When I had Amiga, I too, were into
   painting, image processing, ray tracing, and even video, but when I
   changed to 486, my taste has changed. Now I am using more WP,
   spreadsheet, structured/bitmapped drawing. When I used to use
   Excellence/Pro Write, I used to think that's all I needed, since I
   knew the limitation, and I never thought of producing any document
   that cannot be handled by the programs. Things have changed when I
   used Word for Win, as it is so easy to produce document with full of
   diagrams, formulas and professional looking documents even with my
   24pin dot matrix printer. Same can be said with other programs I use
   now with Windows.

>>>Do Gateway engineers post on the Internet?  The free advice and info from
>>>the C= engineers on the c.s.amiga.* groups is invaluable, IMHO.
>>
>>When you have an "industry standard" computer, advice is plentiful and
>>free.  And when your vendor has 24 hour support (many do) you don't
>>even have to wait for a reply to your message!
>
>And by buying an "industry standard" computer, you have helped to insure
>that personal computers will be held back for years to come.  And because
>the Clones are such pieces of hacked together junk, you'll need that 
>support line to get the damn thing running.  "Oh, just set this jumper to
>R7 and then reboot, go into CMOS setup, select DF32 OFF, save it to CMOS
>RAM and exit.  Edit the autoexec.bat file to include the line C:\DOS\KLUDGE
>and the config.sys file to say KLUDGE=3.  Now, reboot again and then run
>the MSD program to be sure that there are no memory conflicts.  When done,
>go into Windows and edit the Kludge .pif file with ..."
>
>That's what I call total bullshit, yet Clone owners will often come across
>things like that when installing new hardware or software.  It is truly a
>pity that the world got suckered in by IBM and Microsoft's deceptions.
>

   Bull shit? I still rememberr making many many modification with an
   editor called 'az' to edit startup-sequence, which is basically
   AUTOEXEC.BAT with much less restriction. I don't know if things have
   improved now, but in those days(which is not long ago), not many
   programs came with HD installer, or very poor at doing it. So I had
   to copy them manually, and assign the FD label to some XXXX:. I found
   many novice users couldn't handle this.
   And lastly, I've been teaching lots of private people while studying,
   and I've suggested at least 10 systems so far. They are all
   cheapest-possible-clone system with known brand name for HD, video
   card, floppy drive, and MB. None of them ever caused any problems
   so far, and I don't think it will either later on. It is not nice to
   call clone system kludge/bullshit/sucks/whatever without justifying
   why they are. Most of your explanations come from very small sample
   and much less experience with them compare to Amiga.


>Skip Sauls, Amiga Advocate
>skip@tacky.cs.olemiss.edu
>

-TG