>> 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...)
>
> The only way that the Amiga would outperform a P4 would be if you added
> some busy loops into the program to deliberately make it slower.

To be clear: The P4 obviously wipes the floor with the Amiga if you ask 
it to do something that's actually compute-bound, like running POV-Ray. 
(IIRC, Skyvase.pov takes about 2 *hours* on a stock Amiga 1200. Even a 
P4 can polish it off faster than that.) I'm talking specifically about 
GUI responsiveness.

It's perfectly possible for a PC running Windows to perform far, far 
slower than an Amiga. Consider the following factors:

* Virtual memory paging. (Apparently 128MB RAM just isn't enough for 
Windows NT, never mind Windows XP. The Amiga's piffling 2MB is 
apparently *plenty* for the native AmigaOS - rather unsurprisingly.)

* Network lag. (Remember, if you browse to a network share, the entire 
GUI freezes while Windows waits for a reply. Multi-threading? What's that?)

* Video drivers. (If you don't install the drivers for your graphics 
card, at least under Windows NT, the system performs *laughably* slowly. 
I mean a C64 could out-run this! Never mind an actual Amiga... If you 
*do* install the drivers but they're just a bit crap, expect poor 
performance.)

* Antivirus software. (Even when my Amiga was running such, it never 
seemed to have any measurably performance impact. Ever tried installing 
Norton System Works? It's *notorious* for slowing PCs down to the point 
of near unusability.)

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.

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