second thoughts on buying a 3000UX

[Randell Jesup]

In article <13376 at hubcap.clemson.edu> ddyer at hubcap.clemson.edu (Doug Dyer) writes:
>>If I spent all day just running X programs then the A3000 might make more
>>sense.  But, I spend all day compiling code.  I need max. disk and cpu
>>speed.  90% of the time graphics thruput contributes zip to my productivity.
>>The rest of the time, I'm maybe moving windows, which the 486 can do faster
>>on a 12MHz bus than the Amiga blitter on it's slow slow slow 7.14 MHz bus.
>
>The blitter isn't used under UNIX (see below).  The CPU is.  He he he

	Also note that most all existing VGA-etc boards have a LOT of wait-
states, so regardless of CPU/bus speed, you're card-limited.  The 3000 has
pretty efficient access to chip memory (with the 32-bit bus).  It does
need to sync to the slower bus, but I wouldn't be suprised if the bandwidth
available to the CPU (MB/s, gfx-mem to gfx-mem) was considerably higher on
the A3000 than on most or all VGA boards.  Plus you can run the blitter in
parallel with the CPU - even if it's slower at some things, overall throughput
is higher (and it is faster at non-nice conditions, I suspect).  Also you
get the the rest of the display hardware (copper, etc), which makes virtual
screens easy and very fast.

	Note: I haven't measured these things, I'm going on reports from IBM-
types about the number of wait-states to access video ram (I've heard numbers
as high as 12).

-- 
Randell Jesup, Keeper of AmigaDos, Commodore Engineering.
{uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!jesup, jesup at cbmvax.commodore.com  BIX: rjesup  
The compiler runs
Like a swift-flowing river
I wait in silence.  (From "The Zen of Programming")  ;-)