🚀 go-pugleaf

peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <nevin-0809950153300001@mac-nevin.cs.arizona.edu>,
>Nevin ":-]" Liber <nevin@CS.Arizona.EDU> wrote:
>> I have a little secret for you:  the only difference between CMT and PMT
>> is how tasks get swapped; ie, the whether scheduling is under application
>> control or OS control.
[...]
>And if you want to compare operating systems, why don't you at least compare
>similar systems, instead of comparing a multiuser/preemptive/fair share
>scheduler with a single user/cooperative/demand driven one. Change one thing
>at a time... compare Apples and Amigas.

Good method!

>Like the Mac, the Amiga is a single user/low security system with a demand
>driven scheduler. The biggest difference between it and the Mac is the
>preemptive multitasker. For modern systems, 68020 and above, the blitter
>is pretty much irrelevant: a 68020 can swamp the bus.
>
>The Amiga O/S provides a much more responsive environment than the Macintosh
>does, even on much smaller and less powerful systems. The first comparison
>I did was between an Amiga 1000 (7 MHz 68000, plus blitter) with a Mac SE
>(68020 or 68030 at 16 MHz). For ordinary window operations the Amiga was
>faster, for application startup the Amiga was faster, and overall it was
>more responsive.

The Mac SE has a 7.?MHz 68000. Perhaps you mean SE/30, which has a 16MHz
68030? It'd be nice if you stated the OS versions too, since they can make
a big difference.

As you stated, the real problem with cooperative multitasking is that, to
get good response when there is some CPU-hungry task in the background that
task must return control to the OS often enough. Unfortunately, in the real
world most such background tasks don't.

Regards,
        Julian