Where do 68k CPUs fall in terms of power compared to 8086?

[matthey]

Originally Posted by amilo3438

Agree, but "DMIPS/MHz" maybe work better !

Dhrystone measures the compiler performance more than the CPU performance. Turning the results into a ratio will not help. CoreMark (embedded) is a better integer benchmark with low requirements but is still dependent on compiler performance which is a handicap for the 68k.

Originally Posted by EugeneNine

Because the MAC OS and architecture sucked, its most important goal was looks so everything else like performance or cost came second.

The 68k Mac OS system calls used A-line traps to the OS operating in Supervisor mode which are very slow but potentially give better security than the AmigaOS. The AmigaOS not only stays in user mode but also passes arguments in registers instead of using the more common 68k AT&T ABI which passes them on the stack. Most compilers (and therefore benchmarks) will use the ancient stack based AT&T ABI also giving the 68k a further handicap which the AmigaOS creators were able to partially avoid.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by matthey

The 68k Mac OS system calls used A-line traps to the OS operating in Supervisor mode which are very slow but potentially give better security than the AmigaOS.

68k Macs run permanently in supervisor mode, including user programs. They just never go to user mode. So there is little security in here

Oddly enough the Atari ST is the most secure of the three

[amilo3438]

Originally Posted by trixster

I'd take some of those figures with a very large pinch of salt.

68020 at 33mhz = 10MIPS... really? My 28mhz 020 managed just over 5 so 10 seems a bit of a stretch.

Similarly I'd be impressed if an amiga equipped 50mhz 030 actually returned 18mips....

These figures must be entirely theoretical as they don't match the real world. In fact, the page states similar at the beginning.

Hmm, I dont know but there existing some examples! (and seems very close to mentioned)

SysSpeed test results -> http://amiga.resource.cx/perf/sysspeed.html

Blizzard 1220 (020/28, 3.0, Maxtor 2585AT, DC-FFS, 512) = 9.33 MIPS
M-Tec 68020i (020/14, 882/14, ECS, 3.1, Quantum CTS120S, FFS, 512, Nexus SCSI) = 4.56 MIPS

Blizzard 1230 IV (030/50, 3.0, Quantum Lightning 730A, I-FFS, 512) = 16.40 MIPS
Blizzard 4030 (030/50, 882/50, 3.1 in RAM, Quantum LP52S, FFS, 512) = 16.50 MIPS


EDIT:
In the Description of tests is said the following:
"Note: There is no real method to test MIPS/MFLOPS, SysSpeed uses its own method and its results cannot be compared to those of other benchmark programs."

So try to measure your system with SySSpeed to get similar results!

[Jack Burton]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

As others have said, that's more to do with the graphics chipsets than the CPU. And, given that Dune 2 and the OCS version of UFO were targeted at the OCS chipset of 1985, it's hardly any wonder a PC in 1993 looked much better. Had they targeted the higher spec systems, we might have seen more comparable results.

As for UFO (for AGA) I always wondered if it was the way it was coded that made it run so slowly/jerky or if it was because of the video chipset limitation since it literally crawls on my Blizzard 1260...

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by TroyWilkins

My brother and I shared an Amstrad PC2286 machine, until I got my Amiga 1200HD/40.

The 2 machines were fairly well matched in some ways, the 286 ran at 12.5MHz, had 1Mb RAM, a 40Mb HDD and VGA. At the time, my A1200 was stock, so 68ec020 @ 14.18MHz (PAL), 2Mb RAM, 40Mb HDD and AGA.

Sings "
Amstrad Action,
Amstrad Action,
You're Not Fit To Wipe my arse...
You're Not Fit to wipe my arse."

(Unofficial, but if you didn't have a theme song of sorts, you weren't a real Future magazine)

Originally Posted by TroyWilkins

Civilisation was an absolute DOG on the 1200 when compared to the 286, which ran it quite notably better, with much shorter pauses between turns.

Syndicate was the exact opposite, ...

... It was interesting, and as we all know, my A1200 wasn't running as fast as if could, due to not having any fast RAM at the time.

Originally Posted by idrougge

Civilization is slow to the point of being unplayable even on an A4000. Microprose must have done something really wrong when porting that.

It's an issue if you haven't got a chunk of fast RAM to play with, 2MB or more. If a game is hard disk installable, it's also ram disk installable, usually. Load game to fast RAM disk(s) and assign the disks as floppies. Game much nicer.

If you play from floppy, some games like Civilization are dogs on an AGA Amiga with no fast RAM in AGA, even from hard disk. It was designed for hard disk, but more importantly, some fast RAM too. Sid Meir didn't know any different, that the Amiga version was very very chuggy and clunky at loading from 1MB or more of only Chip RAM. As far as Microprose knew, all future 1MB or more Amigas would have some fast RAM. I don't think ANYBODY ever played the Amiga version from floppy on such a chip mem only machine until long after it was released. Could be wrong on that. The guy I knew who reviewed it was concerned at issues from playing from floppy, but conceded that from hard drive it was truly deep and rewarding. He played it on an 512KB chip RAM 1MB A500, almost certainly mostly from hard drive with extra fast RAM too, but no accelerator.

Also, if you are playing ECS game, display in ECS at original res (NTSC for a game like Amiga Civ that came from America) for best fidelity. That helps some on its own.

On topic, I guess the way you really have to rate the whole comparison is bus sizes for expansions, processor, chipset, memory, drive possibilities, graphic possibilities. You can do that for individual Amiga types of board and daughter expansion boards, and PC types of mainboard and expansions. Some of it is comparable to the 286-386, but the principle difference advantage on the Amiga side is potential total bus address (RAM, ROM, expansions, everything possible). The A1000 had limitations here, the other Amigas less so. But, the processor socket of even an A1000 can still be used for a bigger 32 bit processing module, which wasn't really an option on 286 and 386 machines, that I am aware of.

Where the PCs maybe had the advantage in design was network ability. Every single PC ever, had a whole array of network options. Machines like the A1000, A500, and even the big box Amigas to a certain extent were kind of limited in that respect.Plus, you could do 256 colour graphics and 16 bit sound a lot easier than you could do it any Amiga without spending a lot. Such things worked a whole lot better on a 486, and that's maybe where the Amiga came unstuck - it didn't usually come in a standardized box for all types, that you could just swap the boards, in and out. You could take your old cards from 286 and 386 with you.

Price difference and availability of hardware options is the real difference, I guess. You should get better results in ways using an Amiga, but you wouldn't get it cheaper, you'd have to pay more to find out if it worked better. Offputting to people, an unsure question to answer.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

If you play from floppy, some games like Civilization are dogs on an AGA Amiga with no fast RAM in AGA, even from hard disk.

Civilization is dog-slow on an A4000 with 68040 and fast RAM.

[Pat the Cat]

Shouldn't be slow on any Amiga loaded from ram disk assigned properly, not the original ECS version... I guess it really also depends on whether you are playing the AGA version or the original version, which had an intro that you could not skip. I never played the AGA version. Much nicer looking, apparently.

[appiah4]

I tried the whdload version on a winuae a1200 setup. It totally sucked without fast mem but with 8mb fastmem it was ok. I remember it running A LOT better on a 486DX33 with 4mb RAM however.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by appiah4

The math co-processor must have had a lot to do with it too, I suppose.

Nope, I think basically quake 1 was the first game that really needed an FPU. :-) Those old 386 era games definitely didn't, hardly anyone had the 387.

Originally Posted by EugeneNine

Because the MAC OS and architecture sucked, its most important goal was looks so everything else like performance or cost came second.

Hehe, yep, also it seems Apple guys were always so proud to save HW costs by doing stuff in SW, but this was a time where the machines couldn't really pull it off in SW yet. :-)

[daxb]

Civilization is slow (not HD loading times) on my A1200 040/40 32MB. On Shapeshifter emulations Civ it is much better. So I guess game code isn`t the best.

[Tigerskunk]

What would a Vampire V2 compare to in the x86 world?

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by Steril707

What would a Vampire V2 compare to in the x86 world?

Per clock or overall? Per clock the not-yet-released gold2 core benchmarks as a 78 MHz Core2 Solo.

Otherwise it is comparable to a slow-clocked Pentium 3 at about 300 MHz. If you use AMMX heavily, 400.

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by daxb

Civilization is slow (not HD loading times) on my A1200 040/40 32MB. On Shapeshifter emulations Civ it is much better. So I guess game code isn`t the best.

Which version is the clunker that doesn't go right on the AGA machines, is it Civilization AGA? Or the original ECS version? Because the original was never tested on more than 512K chip RAm, accelerators, WB2, AGA or an awful lot of other Amiga upgades that happened years later.

The game engine should be very similar, if not identical, between the 2 versions.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Otherwise it is comparable to a slow-clocked Pentium 3 at about 300 MHz. If you use AMMX heavily, 400.

Oh, that's nice.

I remember I could already do a lot with a machine in that range.. Had a Pentium 3 with 333 mhz for a long time back then..

[daxb]

@Pat the Cat:
Civilization AGA I`m talking about but as you mentioned ECS might be similar (out of memory). If I remember right Civ on A500 + slowram was already (very) slow. I built an own startup-sequence with several patches for max speed. Its much better but you still can see (16x16?) gfx blitting when moving on map. Unit moving and menu navigation could be faster too. All on a small Lowres screen. With mac emulation (shapeshifter) on 640x480 8bit it is much better. The opposite should be the case.

[TroyWilkins]

I tried the OCS/ECS version of Civ in the current version of WinUAE on an emulated stock A1200, from the disks (not installed to HDD) and it was just like I remembered it, in that trying to use the mouse for anything required holding the left button down for a moment, simply clicking it didn't register a mouse click. I didn't play it long enough to have a decent size civilisation to manage, but it was still quite sluggish, and I'm not talking about when it needed to access the disk, which wasn't what made it unbearable in my experience, it was the sluggishness of the game itself when it wasn't accessing the disk. I honestly don't remember if I had the AGA version or not back in the day, probably not.

[Amiga1991]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Civilization is slow to the point of being unplayable even on an A4000. Microprose must have done something really wrong when porting that.

What? It ran fine on an A500, the only problem being disk loading time. There wasn't huge waiting for the CPU to do things.

[Amiga1991]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

Kind of. What made the 486 machines most attractive was price, due to PC manufacturers agreement on common standards for hardware = cheaper hardware prices.

Once you could buy a 486 + monitor + hard drive + 256 colour graphics card + 16 bit soundcard for the same price as an A500 or A1200 without any extras, it was game over, from a hardware sales point of view.

Here's a six years late quibble, and almost nobody is likely to read it, but here goes You are right that their falling prices made them popular but it is hyperbole to suggest that they were ever as cheap as a stock A500 or A1200 (the A1200 never cost more than £400). According to a site called "Dosdays" which documents the history of PCs by year, the cheapest 1995 example (on that site) of a 486 with monitor, hard disk + VGA (this one doesn't mention soundcard) was £499 excluding VAT, which would take it up to about £586 with VAT. That example was from a segment titled "Cheapest/Clearance PCS" by the website. And that's 1995, when the flight from the Amiga really began to take hold in 1993. PCs were desirable because they were cheap enough that, despite costing a lot more, they were now within the budget of many lower-middle class households and you got considerably more for your money (hard disk, a much faster processor, more productivity software and more games that were developed first for PC and therefore not the often unoptimised conversions we were increasingly getting for the Amiga), much more ambitious games that needed hard disks and sometimes CD drives, and they were the ubiquitous office PCs, so came with/could run high quality office software that the parents knew and would get kids familiar with what they'd be using when they got jobs. That last bit was critical I think, because parents were prepared to spend more than they would on a computer like the Amiga, which they understood to be more of a games machine, whereas the IBM compatible PC was THE established computer of the business world and was being advertised relentlessly on British TV in one way or another (such as "Intel Inside" ads becoming very frequent circa 1993 or thereabouts), and the PC was what increasing numbers of parents were becoming familiar with at work (places that got by without computers in the 80s were now starting to use them), and Windows GUI was improving and becoming more user friendly. But in 1994 (for example), to be buying the sort of setup you describe would be costing more like double the price of a stock A1200 at the bare minimum. Actually probably more; I just looked up an old magazine scan of CU Amiga and in Jan '94 one ad shows the standalone A1200 at £274. It then becomes a moot point later in 1994, because you couldn't buy A1200s in the second half of the year, at least not from magazine ads due to Commodore going under.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Civilization is slow to the point of being unplayable even on an A4000. Microprose must have done something really wrong when porting that.

Why does people have to make absolut BS statements to try to make a point ?

You need to remember that your 2023 demande are not on par with 1993 ones. Many (many) peoples played countless hours on Civ on the Amiga, both ECS and AGA versions, and personnally I'm still playing it nowadays on a configuration lesser than an A4000.

The Amiga version was very playable (and still is).

[redblade]

maybe a good cpu benchmark is compression and decompression as it doesn't rely on what graphics mode the display has compared to 3d engines.