On 21-3-2013 22:21, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>>> system *easily* out-performs any 4GHz Pentium-IV system in terms of GUI
>>> responsiveness.
>>
>> That's a physical impossibility, given that a 4GHs P4 is probably at
>> least
>> a hundred times faster then any Amiga in all possible regards (CPU speed,
>> memory speed, HD speed...)
>>
[snip]
> So yes, a P4 is *vastly* superior to the Amiga's 68020 in terms of
> compute power. (A fact easily verified by comparing Debian 68k agains
> Debian i386.) But compute performance is *not* the only metric of
> importance when considering apparent user responsiveness.
>
> Having said all that, in the main PC hardware seems to have finally
> reached the point where an expensive PC is as fast as my 20-year old
> Amiga in terms of visible responsiveness.

I am afraid Andy is correct here (except for his prediction/observation 
that the PC almost caught up, any generation of a PC system was 
responsive when it came out of the box, but that stopped after you had 
used it for some time).
The Amiga was a multiprocessor system with the GUI almost entirely 
handled by a coprocessor/firmware/hardware, the distinction is hard to 
make in this case. That meant that neither IO nor computations would 
interrupt the GUI; even if you completely overloaded the machine with 
computations and disk access the system was totally responsive visually. 
Many times my Amiga completely hung on something but I could still move 
the windows in real time, the mouse was functioning, even the buttons 
could be pressed.
The only way a modern PC could even come close to such GUI performance 
is when one processor would be set aside for GUI only with no other 
tasks and even then the other processes could steal so many cycles that 
the GUI is slowed down markedly.

You can now complain that the screen resolution of the Amiga was much 
less, that it was not a full implementation of a preemptive multiuser 
system, that it had no virtual memory etc. But that is all irrelevant to 
the observation that the Amiga had the best GUI response of any system I 
have seen yet.

-- 
When you ask a group of experts in their field how to allocate
research money, they are quite likely to advise to give it
to the larger research groups, headed by experts in their field

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