🚀 go-pugleaf

> : jornmoe@fredrik.atari.no (Joern Moe) writes:
> :
> : >These days the atari and amiga people are arguing which computer have
> : >the fastest cpu (Falcon 030 versus A1200). The 68030 have better performance
> : >than a 68020 when placed in an equal arcitecture. Additionaly the A1200 runs
> : >at 14.4 Mhz, wheras the F030 runs at 16Mhz (i realy think its 16.01xxxMhz)
> : >giving it a extra 10% over the A1200. Summing it all up, my bet is that
> : >this is a dead race!

        Although I am an Amiga user, I am not anti-Atari. I've seen the
Falcon in action and came away moderately impressed. The Falcon still
falls short on some areas I consider important (no internal slots is
one point against the Falcon in my book), but I won't dismiss the Falcon
out of hand.

        Now on to Joern's comments. In an equal architecture an 030 will
outperform an 020 every time, yes. But isn't the Falcon's 030 running on
a 16 bit bus (not counting the graphics subsystem)? In this case, the
difference in clock speed is somewhat balanced by the difference in bus
size (16 bit on Falcon, 32 bit on A1200).

        In a test of raw compute power (eg calculating mandelbrots), I
would expect the Falcon to be faster because of the better caches on
the 030 and the higher clock speed. In a general use environment where
you're moving the mouse about, opening and closing windows, loading
programs and files from disk, etc, I would give the edge to the A1200,
because of it's wider system bus (and better throughput capability as
a result).

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