From: abuhr@owlnet.rice.edu (Aaron M. Buhr)
Subject: Re: HELP--AMIGA OR IBM PC CLONE?
Organization: Rice University
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 23:30:07 GMT

In article <1993Jan12.032743.20137@ra.msstate.edu> skip@tacky.cs.olemiss.edu (Skip Sauls) writes:
>In article <C0owp0.D15@undergrad.math.waterloo.edu> papresco@cantor.math.uwaterloo.ca (Paul Prescod) writes:
>>>And what happens if you don't want to use Windows?  You hope that there
>>>is a driver for your application or game that works with your board.  If
>>>not, you are SOL.  
>>
>>VGA is acceptable.  It's better then the Amiga used for years.
>
>Really?  Do you know what VGA is?  Max res is 640x480 with only 16 colors.
>For 256 colors, you drop down to 320x200 or 320x400.  There is no support
>for overscan, there are no sprites, and there is only limited panning and
>scrolling in hardware.  The only area in which it is superior to the Amiga
>is the 18bit palette versus the Amiga's 12bit palette.

     Skip, do you agree that for non-NTSC/PAL-targeted applications, higher
resolution and higher refresh rates are more useful than lower resolution
and lower refresh rates?  If so, plain old VGA is certainly more useful than
pre-ECS chipsets.  If not, I bet you'd be in the minority (of computer-
using people; c.s.a.a. has a very unusual following).  Granted, the older
Amigas had faster animation speeds _at comparable lower resolutions_, but I
wager for most non-video* work (meaning the majority of work of any kind done
on computers) the higher resolution and lack of interlace flicker would more
than compensate for lower BitBLT speeds.



>Intel talks about OverDrive, "speed doubling", and that sort of thing 
>in their ads.  Nowhere do they explain that only the internal circuitry
>is double speed.  Motorola could say the same thing about the 68040 as
>it too runs at 50MHz internally...
>
>>>Intel conveniently left out the fact that the DX2's do not run at 66 or
>>>50MHz externally, confusing many people.  In fact, I've seen people become
>>>very upset when they realize that they'd been had by Intel...
>>
>>Yes, I'm sure you have.  I'm sure you told them:"Guess what, your CPU
>>isn't really faster then a 50Mhz 486." which is bull.
>
>No, I explained that their motherboard is still only 33MHz, not the 66MHz
>that they were led to believe.
...
>No, their business is making money, just like everyone else.  But Intel
>should be accountable for their deceptions, especially when their average
>customer is such a moron.  "Duh, it does so run at 66 mega-hurts!  Says 
>so right here on the box!  What 'chu mean it ain't no real 66 mega-hurts-her?"


     It seems like you really don't believe that a DX2-33/66 CPU will
deliver 75% or more of the performance of a fully-66MHz CPU.  Is this true,
or am I just getting the wrong impression?  Do you not believe Intel's
claims that the on-chip cache catches 85% or more of all memory accesses?
As long as the CPU stays on-chip, it runs at 66MHz.  As always, for
non-compute-bounded applications you will not see a system speed increase
equivalent to the increase in CPU speed; disk, video, etc. will still be
bottlenecks.  But that is hardly the fault of the CPU, and I don't see how
you can criticize Intel on that basis, or how you can say people are getting
"had" by Intel.  That same effect can be had when moving from a 386 to a
486, or 68030 to 68040, or whatever.  If your CPU isn't the bottleneck, or
at least if it's not using a significant amount of whatever application
program time, improving the CPU speed isn't going to help you that much.


>Compared to the joke that is MS-DOS, Windows is an improvement.  But it
>is popular because of MS-DOS.  Without it, Windows would be nowhere,
>just like OS/2 is.  I hate to tell you, but in terms of numbers of users,
>AmigaDOS is ahead of OS/2...

     Would you like to give some figures about how many of those AmigaDOS
users are using 2000's or better?  I'll go out on a limb here and say that
the users with 2000's or better would be much more likely to spend
significant amounts of money on software, especially business software, than
those with Amigas under the 2000 (1000, 500, 600, maybe 1200?).  In
contrast, OS/2 users have already invested significant quantities of money
in their systems (386 or better, 6MB of RAM or better), which again I will
state would imply that they have greater inclination and ability to pay for
(business) software.  If you don't believe this, would you like to provide
some demographics for the Amiga user base, such as income vs. computer type,
and would you then claim that the low-income people would buy amounts of
(business) software equivalent to the higher-income people?

    Another interesting datum would be the number of Amigas owned per Amiga
user, vs. the number of copies of OS/2 owned per OS/2 user.  I would think
that most Amiga owners would not buy more than one copy of a program, no
matter how many Amigas they owned, and I would bet there are a significant
number of Amiga owners who own more than one Amiga.  The point of all this
is that OS/2 software development would likely be more profitable than
Amiga software development, despite the relative numbers of each sold.


>>Exactly which of *TODAY'S* sound boards have you heard?
>
>I have a SoundBlaster Pro sitting in my 486 at work and it is pitiful
>next to the Amiga.  

     The SoundBlaster Pro is old technology, even though it supports 44.1KHz
16-bit 2-channel, DMA-driven stereo playback, which seems to me better than
the 44.1KHz (or possibly higher, albeit no use to humans) 8-bit 4-channel,
DMA-driven stereo playback of the Amiga.  Even allowing for the (was it 6?)
bit independent volume control of each channel, that's 14 bits.  The Amiga
only wins in that it has two extra channels, which I would submit are not
a very big advantage.  It seems to me that the only time the extra two
channels are useful is when you're more or less randomly generating sound
effects, such as in a game, rather than a predetermined sound sequence such
as multimedia playback.  And for games, if you depend on the extra two 
channels that means that you can have a mere two extra independent sounds.
Nice, but hardly earth shattering.  Then you have to start mixing using the
CPU, and the two extra channel advantage pales.  This of course doesn't take
into account the 11-voice FM synthesis, which can sometimes produce fairly
nice background music, or the audio input of the SoundBlaster Pro, or the
fact that there are many new cards that far outstrip the SB Pro.  Check
comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard (I think) for more information.


     Maybe I'm the only one, but to me there seems to be a lot of hyperbole
and opinion disguised as fact in your posts, Skip.  It probably is just me,
but I feel more comfortable with more IMO's in people's posts (when that
is indeed what they are referring to).


*  (From above)  By non-video work, I mean work for which the final output
   will not heavily rely on _moving screen images_.  This of course includes
   word processing, number crunching, programming (the output of programming
   is a program, not the results of said program), static graphics, etc. etc.


Aaron Buhr
abuhr@owlnet.rice.edu