English Amiga Board - View Single Post

babsimov · 11 September 2017, 21:36

I found a document that compared the different RISC processors of the 90s.

At the end of this document is a comparative table of performances.

Sorry it's in French

It can be seen that PA-RISC was, in fact, the most powerful processor of the time. In fact he obtains a score in floating calculation equivalent to that of the DEC Alpha (deemed the most powerful) and barely inferior in full to that of the Alpha.

But, you also have to see how often it gets these very good results. It is at 180 mhz there or to obtain equivalent performances a Dec Alpha has to turn to 500 mhz !!!

It can also be seen that in this table the PA-RISC is the one that is clocked at the lowest frequency and that it surpasses all its competitors yet having a higher frequency.
The PowerPC is well ahead, especially floating. The PentiumPRO (thus the X86) is also largely exceeded while it runs at 200 mhz against 180 mhz for PA-RISC. Let's talk about the MIPS (the one of the PS1), it gets very close results ... but turning to almost 100 mhz above the PA-RISC. So if Commodore had released, as expected, a machine based on PA-RISC at 50 mhz, this machine would have had pure performance far above the MIPS at 33 mhz of a playstation.

That is why it confirms me in my opinion that finally the choice of PA-RISC by the engineers of Commodore was most judicious and that it could have re-launched advantageously the Amiga.

For information, PA-RISC ended his career in 2005 at 1.1 ghz.

11 September 2017, 21:36	#157
babsimov Registered User Join Date: Jun 2017 Location: France Posts: 40	I found a document that compared the different RISC processors of the 90s. At the end of this document is a comparative table of performances. Sorry it's in French It can be seen that PA-RISC was, in fact, the most powerful processor of the time. In fact he obtains a score in floating calculation equivalent to that of the DEC Alpha (deemed the most powerful) and barely inferior in full to that of the Alpha. But, you also have to see how often it gets these very good results. It is at 180 mhz there or to obtain equivalent performances a Dec Alpha has to turn to 500 mhz !!! It can also be seen that in this table the PA-RISC is the one that is clocked at the lowest frequency and that it surpasses all its competitors yet having a higher frequency. The PowerPC is well ahead, especially floating. The PentiumPRO (thus the X86) is also largely exceeded while it runs at 200 mhz against 180 mhz for PA-RISC. Let's talk about the MIPS (the one of the PS1), it gets very close results ... but turning to almost 100 mhz above the PA-RISC. So if Commodore had released, as expected, a machine based on PA-RISC at 50 mhz, this machine would have had pure performance far above the MIPS at 33 mhz of a playstation. That is why it confirms me in my opinion that finally the choice of PA-RISC by the engineers of Commodore was most judicious and that it could have re-launched advantageously the Amiga. For information, PA-RISC ended his career in 2005 at 1.1 ghz.