🚀 go-pugleaf

ultrasparc3@hotmail.com wrote:
> In <3EF4BBDC.5080103@neoholistic.org> "Daniel J. Pavon-Moreno" <djpavon@neoholistic.org> writes:
> 
>>Oh, I reserved 32MB of contiguous memory, but both imagetool & showmetv 
>>(which are linked against the xil libraries) run really slow. In 
>>particular, window scrolling in imagetool is a joke. And image 
>>operations using the pallete (rotations in particular) often lead to 
>>image corruption in my system.
> 
> 
> what version of Solaris are you running?  some of the SX optimizations
> were removed from newer versions.  for its time the SS20 did very well
> with imaging, beating everything Apple had in many PhotoShop benchmarks.
> now the cheapest computer at Fry's can probably outperform it, it's time
> to let go.
> 

Sure, I'm not comparing it to a modern system (that would be pointless, 
though my old ss20 seems to do quite well under heavy load (several 
large compilations at once) compared to my slightly-less-old pentium). I 
had heard already about photoshop performance on the sx; it just seems 
to do well on image processing, but not in moving data from one location 
to other within video ram, at least compared to pci gfx cards from the 
same period (94-95). BTW, I'm running 2.5.1; I think the support for the 
sx xil hardware pipelines were removed on 2.6, but can't tell for sure.

> 
>>>SuperSPARC-only modules also did a better (at least until processors
>>>faster than 60MHz showed up) since having the SuperCACHE would add a
>>>cycle or two of latency to the MBus accesses which is how you talk
>>>to the cg14.
>>
>>Interesting. So you traded cpu performance for gfx performance. Great 
>>design.
> 
> 
> you are not making any sense.  first, "I" did not do anything.  second,
> it's application performance that matters and if PhotoShop runs faster
> with a 50MHz l2-cache-less module than with a 50MHz l2-cache-full module
> then where is the problem?  all that matters to most to us is that the
> application goes faster.

I didn't mean "you" personally. I used the term in a general sense. And 
I agree, in the end it's the application performance what matters, 
regardless of technical details. But I still feel the cg14 to be 
overpriced and underpowered (for general windowing operations) for its 
time. Not that it matters anymore, as it's nearly ten years old...