Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!mailrus!ames!oliveb!amiga!cbmvax!daveh
From: daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Blitter vs. 80386
Message-ID: <4479@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: 11 Aug 88 19:07:53 GMT
References: <1800@vu-vlsi.Villanova.EDU>
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 66

in article <1800@vu-vlsi.Villanova.EDU>, cheung@vu-vlsi.Villanova.EDU (Wilson Cheung) says:
> Keywords: Which is faster?

Well, even if it's running a brain-dead OS like MS-DOS, a '386 machine is a
real 32 bit machine.  Real 32 bit machines do have an annoying habit of going
faster than 16 or 16/32 bit machines that run at 1/2 the clock speed.  You
can expand an Amiga (at least an A2000) to compete with this; it's not going
to be on the average college kid budget, however.

> 	This rather impressive speed causes me to wonder which is actually 
> faster in animations, a 16 Mhz 386 with no wait state 32- bit memory and
> a 256K EGA card or the blitter on the Amiga.  

Well, I understand the CPU interface to most EGA cards is really slow, but if
you've got the '386 doing you computations, it'll look fast.  Possibly faster
than the Amiga+blitter, especially if you don't have any FAST memory.  The
68020 also stacks up pretty favorably against the Amiga's blitter.  The blitter
will still do some operations faster, but the main advantage of the blitter on
the Amiga in a full 32 bit system is that it give you parallelism -- The 
blitter can scroll a screen for me while my CPU does something else.

> Ah, remember the days in which
> I was proud to own a hot machine called the Amiga.  Now a days I am embarrassed
> to say the name Amiga in the same breath of IBM PC.  Being an EE student
> mentioning the Amiga is seems a sure ticket for some substantial joking 
> ridicule.  "Oh, and here is my 386 machine with 287 coprocessor, 2 Meg of 
> RAM, VGA card and Zenith flat screen VGA monitor.  

> Hey why does that display look so crappy.  

Well, I have this nice A2000 here with 7 meg of RAM, 68020, 68881 coprocessor.
Add a FlickerFixer and you'll get a VGA compatible display that looks just as
sharp as any VGA or Mac II display.  Think of it in terms of video card -- you
buy different video cards for the PC, EGA or VGA.  For improved video on the
Amiga, you'll have to upgrade too.  The FlickerFixer will give you more colors
than EGA, though not quite as much as VGA (though a 320x400 HAM stacks up
pretty well against VGA's 320x200, 256 colors mode).

> Why is the disk drive so slow? 

Are you still floppy based?  The PCs I've used around here (XTs and ATs) have a
pretty miserable disk performance when running similar things.  You need a
hard disk, and V1.3 software.  That'll bring disk performance up to par the 
absolute best and fastest 20 and 25MHz '386 machines.  Last I heard, around
625K Bytes/Sec.  I'm sure all those PCs around there have hard drives; you've
got to make similar comparisons.

> Why is text so slow?  

Well, you are on a bit-mapped display, some of them aren't.  But even at that,
the current OS is probably using the blitter for small text moves, and that
can be slow.  The Amiga is capable of absolutely fantastic display speeds,
though the software isn't yet as highly tuned as it could be.

> 	Well, I'm getting a bit sidetracked.  The question I'd like to 
> post for discussion is whether an Amiga could hold up to a 386 computer
> with proper NTSC interfacing and similar animation software.

I've heard '386 machines with NTSC display boards usually come out in the
$10,000-$15,000 range.  You could buy two fully loaded A2000 systems for that
kind of money.  And there's still better animation and rendering software on
the Amiga than anything you can get on the PC.
-- 
Dave Haynie  "The 32 Bit Guy"     Commodore-Amiga  "The Crew That Never Rests"
   {ihnp4|uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      PLINK: D-DAVE H     BIX: hazy
		"I can't relax, 'cause I'm a Boinger!"