Windows NT & StrongARM
Tower Electronics Ltd
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Date: Thu, 06 Jun 1996 10:08:03 -0500
From: Frode Wells <frode...@earthlink.net>
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I went to a corporate briefing hosted by Microsoft a few months ago. I
asked both Microsoft & Digital Co. if Windows NT will support StrongARM.
None of them could give me a firm no or yes. The answer was maybe. If
the case is that Windows NT will support StrongARM this would be bad
news for PentiumPro & Intel Co.
Just imagine a RiscPC with two StrongARMs running Windows NT & RiscOS.
Running Windows NT with a StrongARM as a graphics accelerator - it should
be rock steady.
Let there be no question about it I prefer RiscOS & I am very happy with my=
RiscPC. Most people in USA do not seem to understand that RiscOS is a
better platfrom than Windows.
P.S.! You could know that Intel Co. are working hard on their next
generation chips, RISC chips. These chips will replace the PentiumPro
sometime in 1998. They are counting on the PentiumPro & their multimedia
chips in 1997. If you buy a PentiumPro computer you would not get much
for it when you sell it, unlike Acorn computers they hold their value
much longer.
\|/
(. .)
----------------------------------------------------o00-(_)-00o-----
Frode M. Wells=09=09=09 Phone: +1 (305) 861-2931
835 82nd Street #3=09=09 Email: frode...@earthlink.net
Miami Beach, FL 33141-1370, USA
--------------------------ITEM ENDS----------------------------------------=
-
Tom Waller. Tower Electronics Ltd. The Lewes, Main Street, Fyvie
Turriff Aberdeenshire Scotland UK AB53 9BY
Tel UK (44) 01651 891069 Fax UK (44) 01651 891653
http://www.enterprise.net/tower-risc
Steve Jelfs
In article <ant10174...@tower.enterprise.net>
Tower Electronics Ltd <to...@enterprise.net> wrote:
> Dear NewsNet Reader,
[lots of header snipped]
> I went to a corporate briefing hosted by Microsoft a few months ago. I
> asked both Microsoft & Digital Co. if Windows NT will support StrongARM.
> None of them could give me a firm no or yes. The answer was maybe. If
> the case is that Windows NT will support StrongARM this would be bad
> news for PentiumPro & Intel Co.
>
Could it be that they had never heard of StrongArm and therefore could not possibly be in a position to confirm or deny? Sounds like straw clutching to me.
[lots mor snipped]
--
Steve Jelfs
st...@jelfs.demon.co.uk
sd-j...@wpg.uwe.ac.uk
sje...@brookes.ac.uk
... Hailing frequencies open Mr. Worf. - Hi, this is Chris Evans on 1 FM.
Ian Griffiths
Is this a troll?
Tower Electronics Ltd wrote:
>
> If the case is that Windows NT will support StrongARM this
> would be bad news for PentiumPro & Intel Co.
Why exactly? There are already 3 high performance RISC
architectures around which will run NT.
> Just imagine a RiscPC with two StrongARMs running Windows NT &
> RiscOS. Running Windows NT with a StrongARM as a graphics
> accelerator - it should be rock steady.
Now imagine a machine with two PowerPCs running Windows NT, and
a Matrox Millenium graphics accelerator.
My money's on the PPC machine when it comes to speed.
Hell a machine with two P133s and a Matrox Millenium is pretty
darn fast.
--
Ian Griffiths
David Thornton
In article <35454...@jelfs.demon.co.uk>, Steve Jelfs
<st...@jelfs.demon.co.uk> writes
>Could it be that they had never heard of StrongArm and therefore could not
>possibly be in a position to confirm or deny? Sounds like straw clutching to
>me.
I emailed the MS Windows NT project Manager a few weeks ago to ask if
Windows NT would be ported to the StrongARM. He stated that "it doesn't
seem likely."
Windows NT runs best on x86 processors if you are mostly interested in
software compatibility. There are many apps which won't run under the
PowerPC version of NT.
--
David Thornton
da...@modcon.demon.co.uk
Alistair M Cockburn
> Tower Electronics Ltd wrote:
> >
> > If the case is that Windows NT will support StrongARM this
> > would be bad news for PentiumPro & Intel Co.
> > RiscOS. Running Windows NT with a StrongARM as a graphics
> > accelerator - it should be rock steady.
Why stop at 2? The Hydra can do many more :)
--
"A radical is a man with both feet planted firmly in the air"
Thomas Down
Alistair M Cockburn (cock...@argonet.co.uk) wrote:
: > Tower Electronics Ltd wrote:
: > >
: > > If the case is that Windows NT will support StrongARM this
: > > would be bad news for PentiumPro & Intel Co.
: > > Just imagine a RiscPC with two StrongARMs running Windows NT &
: > > RiscOS. Running Windows NT with a StrongARM as a graphics
: > > accelerator - it should be rock steady.
: Why stop at 2? The Hydra can do many more :)
Because Windows NT multi processor supports is very non-scalable, and
the benefits of having more than 2 processors diminish very rapidly..
-- Thomas
"I am a Keeper, and responsible only to my own conscience."
- Elorie, The Bloody Sun
Tower Electronics Ltd
In article <31BD71...@dev.madge.com>, Ian Griffiths
NO TOWER ELECTRONICS DID NOT WRITE SIMPLY RELAYED THE original E mail
from america::::
> > If the case is that Windows NT will support StrongARM this
> > would be bad news for PentiumPro & Intel Co.
>
> Why exactly? There are already 3 high performance RISC
> architectures around which will run NT.
AND HAVE YOU LOOKED AT THE PRICE TAG - go on then purchase your
Sun Sparc or HP/IBM Risc and see how much change you get out of
60,000 ukp! A strongARM based Risc is faster than an Ultra Sparc
and over 65 mips faster than a 90Mhz clock speed Pentium
(These are direct quotes from July edition of the Computer Shopper
magazine - not that well known for its glowing reviews of Acorn
hardware......
> > Just imagine a RiscPC with two StrongARMs running Windows NT &
> > RiscOS. Running Windows NT with a StrongARM as a graphics
> > accelerator - it should be rock steady.
>
> Now imagine a machine with two PowerPCs running Windows NT, and
> a Matrox Millenium graphics accelerator.
Risc PC's do not require a graphics accelerator to display in up
to 32 thousand screen colours at 1024 by 768 pixels when fitted
with 2Mb Vram and most rekon that the next generation of ART
design will improve on this again.
> My money's on the PPC machine when it comes to speed.
You are wrong - see my commercial Web pages for direct quotes from
various sources who now see the PPC ref platform as pretty jaded.
> Hell a machine with two P133s and a Matrox Millenium is pretty
> darn fast.
TRUE.... if you have any to give away for "research and review"...
> Ian Griffiths
Ian Griffiths
Tower Electronics Ltd wrote:
>
> Ian Griffiths <mailto:igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
> >
> > Is this a troll?
> >
> > Tower Electronics Ltd wrote:
>
> NO TOWER ELECTRONICS DID NOT WRITE SIMPLY RELAYED THE original
I somehow suspect that America didn't write that. Maybe someone
in America did.
But anyway, I will correct it:
> > Tower Electronics posted, but didn't provide any useful
> > attribution for this:
:-)
> > > If the case is that Windows NT will support StrongARM this
> > > would be bad news for PentiumPro & Intel Co.
> >
> > Why exactly? There are already 3 high performance RISC
> > architectures around which will run NT.
>
> AND HAVE YOU LOOKED AT THE PRICE TAG - go on then purchase
> your Sun Sparc or HP/IBM Risc
Well the Sun won't run NT of course, and neither will the HP. I
didn't think that PowerPC machines were that expensive.
PowerMACs certainly aren't.
> and see how much change you get out of 60,000 ukp!
For a PowerMAC? Quite a lot actually.
And the next generation PowerMACs will be able to run NT.
I don't have any appropriate price lists to hand. Can you tell
me how much a PPC-based PC costs? I was guessing at sub-2000
UKP. I'm certain it's not 65k.
> A strongARM based Risc is faster than an Ultra Sparc
> and over 65 mips faster than a 90Mhz clock speed Pentium
And by the time a StrongARM version of NT was available? (Not
that that will happen.) The top of the range Pentium is faster
than a P90 by the way. If you are going to make comparisons,
remember that the StrongARM is the very fastest ARM chip around,
and you can't actually go and buy machines with them in yet. So
making comparisons with a slow incarnation of Intel's previous
line of chips is not very meaningful.
> (These are direct quotes from July edition of the Computer
> Shopper magazine - not that well known for its glowing reviews
> of Acorn hardware......
Surprising. Did it contain any useful information too? Have
you edited it to your purposes just as you've done with the
Usenet subjects on your home page?
> > Now imagine a machine with two PowerPCs running Windows NT,
> > and a Matrox Millenium graphics accelerator.
>
> Risc PC's do not require a graphics accelerator to display in
> up to 32 thousand screen colours at 1024 by 768 pixels when
> fitted with 2Mb Vram
No you're right there. However, my Matrox millenium with 2MB of
VRAM will do 1024x768 in 65536 colours too. How do you make
your RiscPC do that? I can upgrade my Matrox Millenium to run
at 1600x1200 in 16 million colours. How do you make your RiscPC
do that?
> and most rekon that the next generation of ART design will
> improve on this again.
Do they? I'm sure you'd like to think that. ART have suggested
that a 4MB VRAM system is a possibility. That will be an
improvement, but it will still be behind today's possibilities
on PCs. Furthermore, the lack of a graphics accelerator will
start to be a problem when more VRAM is available, because the
processor will be having to work twice as hard, and since for
graphics it's mostly bus limited, the StrongARM won't make
things any better.
> > My money's on the PPC machine when it comes to speed.
>
> You are wrong - see my commercial Web pages for direct quotes
> from various sources who now see the PPC ref platform as
> pretty jaded.
The only reference to PPC machines I could find was buried in
the Tower Electronics News. There are no quotes from any
sources so far as I can tell. Would you care to provide a
specific URL so we can read these?
It's called PPCP now not CHRP by the way.
Incidentally your 'these pages look best with Antialiasing'
picture is a little unfair - you've drawn the un-antialiased
text at half the resolution, which is misleading.
> > Hell a machine with two P133s and a Matrox Millenium is
> > pretty darn fast.
>
> TRUE.... if you have any to give away for "research and
> review"...
I only have the one I'm afraid, and I'm not exactly inclined to
part with it at the moment.
--
Ian Griffiths
Greg Hennessy
In article <ant13060...@tower.enterprise.net>,
Tower Electronics Ltd <to...@enterprise.net> writes:
>>
>> Why exactly? There are already 3 high performance RISC
>> architectures around which will run NT.
>
>AND HAVE YOU LOOKED AT THE PRICE TAG - go on then purchase your
>60,000 ukp!
Yup and 60k would buy a very nice machine with quite a lot change
left over. The HP 712/80 that this is being typed on was substantially
less than that, it having 128mb ram and 4 GB of disk space.
> A strongARM based Risc is faster than an Ultra Sparc
Hmmm.... I would like to see how it compares to an Ultra Enterprise 170, I
have yet to see any Arm based box running Oracle 7 or the Netscape WWW
servers, or for that matter any mainstream commercial software. Kinda
reduces it's utility somewhat for practical work, And I wont even mention
useful stuff like hardware FP.
>and over 65 mips faster than a 90Mhz clock speed Pentium
More 'Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed', It might as well be
65 bips faster for use they would be considering the lack of software.
>
> Risc PC's do not require a graphics accelerator to display in up
>to 32 thousand screen colours at 1024 by 768 pixels when fitted
>with 2Mb Vram and most rekon that the next generation of ART
>design will improve on this again.
>
Hmm I run multi-threaded, PMT O/S's, I dont want my CPU tied up
re-drawing windows or blitting graphics around the place.
>> My money's on the PPC machine when it comes to speed.
>
>You are wrong - see my commercial Web pages for direct quotes from
>various sources who now see the PPC ref platform as pretty jaded.
>
Hmm... I have seen one or two Aix boxes with a PPC onboard and
they weren't what one would call jaded.
greg
--
Greg Hennessy
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ZZ Top, They Really Can't Be Beat |ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com
Webmasters do it with <HTML> |cmk...@cix.compulink.co.uk
Nunzz!! Aaargh !!! |gr...@cmkrnl.demon.co.uk
Tony Houghton
In article <Dsy1s...@systems.DHL.COM>
ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com (Greg Hennessy) wrote:
> Hmmm.... I would like to see how it compares to an Ultra Enterprise 170, I
> have yet to see any Arm based box running Oracle 7 or the Netscape WWW
> servers, or for that matter any mainstream commercial software.
If you want to see Netscape running on an ARM try looking at the picture
of RiscBSD in Risc User. Or wait until Netscape port it to the NC.
> Kinda
> reduces it's utility somewhat for practical work,
Not when there's equally practical software available for the majority
of tasks. In fact more practical if you consider it isn't overburdened
with never-used features, doesn't have to fight through a heavyweight
OS, and is affordable.
> And I wont even mention
> useful stuff like hardware FP.
You just did.
> >and over 65 mips faster than a 90Mhz clock speed Pentium
>
> More 'Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed', It might as well be
> 65 bips faster for use they would be considering the lack of software.
Sigh. How long are people going to keep on spouting that ridiculous
mantra? All right, maybe someone's inaccurate over-enthusiasm got you
wound up, but why wind everyone up with more inaccurate irrelevancies?
> > Risc PC's do not require a graphics accelerator to display in up
> >to 32 thousand screen colours at 1024 by 768 pixels when fitted
> >with 2Mb Vram and most rekon that the next generation of ART
> >design will improve on this again.
> >
> Hmm I run multi-threaded, PMT O/S's, I dont want my CPU tied up
> re-drawing windows or blitting graphics around the place.
Some people occasionally concentrate on one graphics-intensive task.
They don't want to sit twiddling their thumbs while the CPU waits for
the graphics accelerator's far slower processor to draw the screen.
--
http://www.tcp.co.uk/~tonyh/
for WinEd, Bombz and miscellaneous utilities for RISC OS
Tony Houghton
In article <31C012...@dev.madge.com>
Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
> No you're right there. However, my Matrox millenium with 2MB of
> VRAM will do 1024x768 in 65536 colours too. How do you make
> your RiscPC do that? I can upgrade my Matrox Millenium to run
> at 1600x1200 in 16 million colours. How do you make your RiscPC
> do that?
How are you going to make your already very responsive PC 4-5x faster
for under 300UKP at the end of summer? ;)
> > and most rekon that the next generation of ART design will
> > improve on this again.
>
> Do they? I'm sure you'd like to think that. ART have suggested
> that a 4MB VRAM system is a possibility. That will be an
> improvement, but it will still be behind today's possibilities
> on PCs.
What makes you think that 4MB VRAM is not an improvement on 2MB?
> Furthermore, the lack of a graphics accelerator will
> start to be a problem when more VRAM is available, because the
> processor will be having to work twice as hard, and since for
> graphics it's mostly bus limited, the StrongARM won't make
> things any better.
It will in fact. My money's on the StrongARM being faster than a Matrox
Millenium. I don't think that just because it's a dedicated graphics
card it means it can magically handle 4-8MB VRAM just as fast as 1-2MB.
Greg Hennessy
In article <c31c...@tonyh.tcp.co.uk>,
Tony Houghton <to...@tcp.co.uk> writes:
>In article <Dsy1s...@systems.DHL.COM>
> ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com (Greg Hennessy) wrote:
>
>If you want to see Netscape running on an ARM try looking at the picture
>of RiscBSD in Risc User. Or wait until Netscape port it to the NC.
>
Note I did say 'WWW servers', not the browser. Netscape running over X does
not count here. I wasn't the one to make a comparison with the ultra sparc
but seeing that someone is trying to make an apples to apples comparison,
Any current or future ARM based system is likely to be found wanting as
commercial applications or DBMS server platform. NT for Strongarm is
just not going to happen.
>> Kinda
>> reduces it's utility somewhat for practical work,
>
>Not when there's equally practical software available for the majority
>of tasks. In fact more practical if you consider it isn't overburdened
>with never-used features, doesn't have to fight through a heavyweight
>OS, and is affordable.
Hmmm... I manage approximately 2000 www users who make active use of
ms-office as helper apps, I dont see the Arm version anywhere. I provide
a searchable WWW interface into a document repository containing > 1gb
of .doc, .xls, .ppt files, I use netscape's commerce and proxy servers,
please tell me how your 'practical software' could plug into this
environment either as a client or a server and allow my users to work as
they do at the moment ?
Whats this about a heavyweight OS ? I dont consider basic OS features like
PMT, VM and Threading to be heavyweight. Just because the developers of
RISC-OS have in their infinite wisdom declined to put these features in
their OS does not reduce their utility on other platforms. As a matter of
fact IMHO it just goes to show that whilst TPTB at acorn have sat on
their collective arses for the past 6/7 years O/S wise the world has
moved on and their product alas is getting long in the tooth.
>
>> And I wont even mention
>> useful stuff like hardware FP.
>
>You just did.
>
:-) Vindication is just so sweet.
>> >and over 65 mips faster than a 90Mhz clock speed Pentium
>>
>> More 'Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed', It might as well be
>> 65 bips faster for use they would be considering the lack of software.
>
>Sigh. How long are people going to keep on spouting that ridiculous
>mantra? All right, maybe someone's inaccurate over-enthusiasm got you
>wound up, but why wind everyone up with more inaccurate irrelevancies?
>
See my point above for further details.
>> > Risc PC's do not require a graphics accelerator to display in up
>> >to 32 thousand screen colours at 1024 by 768 pixels when fitted
>> >with 2Mb Vram and most rekon that the next generation of ART
>> >design will improve on this again.
>> >
>> Hmm I run multi-threaded, PMT O/S's, I dont want my CPU tied up
>> re-drawing windows or blitting graphics around the place.
>
>Some people occasionally concentrate on one graphics-intensive task.
>They don't want to sit twiddling their thumbs while the CPU waits for
>the graphics accelerator's far slower processor to draw the screen.
>
ROFL. You are being slightly naive here. ;-). Check out a Matrox
Millenium sometime and then come back to me with the above assertion.
Shucks even a 70 quid S3 Trio based board will do the job quite nicely.
Some choice have the CPU blit a window over a seriously bus limited
architecture or just send a MoveRect primitive direct to the accelerator's
command queue and return immediately to do some more work. Also most modern
graphic accelerators have useful items like save under and font caches
builtin as default with no additional overhead to either the OS or the CPU.
Ian Griffiths
Tony Houghton wrote:
>
> Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
>
> > No you're right there. However, my Matrox millenium with
> > 2MB of VRAM will do 1024x768 in 65536 colours too. How do
> > you make your RiscPC do that? I can upgrade my Matrox
> > Millenium to run at 1600x1200 in 16 million colours. How do
> > you make your RiscPC do that?
>
> How are you going to make your already very responsive PC 4-5x
> faster for under 300UKP at the end of summer? ;)
It's already faster than all my Acorn machines. :-)
> > > and most rekon that the next generation of ART design will
> > > improve on this again.
> >
> > Do they? I'm sure you'd like to think that. ART have
> > suggested that a 4MB VRAM system is a possibility. That
> > will be an improvement, but it will still be behind today's
> > possibilities on PCs.
>
> What makes you think that 4MB VRAM is not an improvement on
> 2MB?
I didn't say that it wasn't. What I was arguing against was the
suggestion that graphics cards are necessarily a bad thing.
That has rather got lost in the remaining quotes here, but that
was my point.
Yes 4MB is better than 2. It's not as good as 8. On a 32 bit
system, it will be slower with 4MB than a PC 4MB graphics card.
> > Furthermore, the lack of a graphics accelerator will
> > start to be a problem when more VRAM is available, because
> > the processor will be having to work twice as hard, and
> > since for graphics it's mostly bus limited, the StrongARM
> > won't make things any better.
>
> It will in fact. My money's on the StrongARM being faster than
> a Matrox Millenium. I don't think that just because it's a
> dedicated graphics card it means it can magically handle 4-8MB
> VRAM just as fast as 1-2MB.
No, but the fact that it's bus is twice as wide means it can
handle 8MB just as fast as a 32 bit 4MB system. No magic
involved.
My point was that for the majority of graphics output, the bus
is saturated with existing ARMs. A StrongARM will just be
stalled for more clock cycles, it won't actually go any faster,
except for stuff which really is slow enough on current machines
to be limited by processor speed. Artworks (once it works) will
probably go faster on things like graduated fills. Dragging
windows around will not get very much faster (except perhaps
when you're dragging it over complex windows) and indeed will
get a lot slower when 4MB VRAM machines turn up, unless Acorn do
something to make the bus faster.
There is no magic involved, it's just higher bandwidth.
--
Ian Griffiths
Ian Lynch
Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
> Dragging windows around will not get very much faster (except perhaps
> when you're dragging it over complex windows)
Why do you want to drag windows faster? I pull on the mouse and the
window moves to where I want it. Ok it ain't rock steady on RPC 600
but so what? I am not normally trying to read the thing while its
moving. Now screen re-draws, that is something which would be better a
bit faster and rendering some graphics. I understood from the tests
using the Artworks viewer that these would be a lot faster. Are you
saying that they aren't so I'd be better off saving my money?
--
Ian
Tony Houghton
In article <Dsz92...@systems.DHL.COM>
ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com (Greg Hennessy) wrote:
> Note I did say 'WWW servers', not the browser. Netscape running over X does
> not count here. I wasn't the one to make a comparison with the ultra sparc
> but seeing that someone is trying to make an apples to apples comparison,
> Any current or future ARM based system is likely to be found wanting as
> commercial applications or DBMS server platform. NT for Strongarm is
> just not going to happen.
Point taken, but there is an HTML server for RISC OS. How it compares
with Netscape I don't know, but all the web pages I've ever seen merely
consist of a server chucking data at me when asked and occasionally
running a script. There's no reason the RISC OS version couldn't do
that.
> Hmmm... I manage approximately 2000 www users who make active use of
> ms-office as helper apps, I dont see the Arm version anywhere. I provide
> a searchable WWW interface into a document repository containing > 1gb
> of .doc, .xls, .ppt files, I use netscape's commerce and proxy servers,
> please tell me how your 'practical software' could plug into this
> environment either as a client or a server and allow my users to work as
> they do at the moment ?
Computers are becoming more data centred than application centred. If
you're starting with a WWW interface and making it into something that
depends on proprietary 'standards' you're headed in the wrong
direction. Maybe you had no choice at the time.
> Whats this about a heavyweight OS ? I dont consider basic OS features like
> PMT, VM and Threading to be heavyweight. Just because the developers of
> RISC-OS have in their infinite wisdom declined to put these features in
> their OS does not reduce their utility on other platforms. As a matter of
> fact IMHO it just goes to show that whilst TPTB at acorn have sat on
> their collective arses for the past 6/7 years O/S wise the world has
> moved on and their product alas is getting long in the tooth.
Undoubtedly RISC OS would be better off with PMT, VM and Threading. But
for some reason every OS that has these features suffers from bloat. VM
is just a necessity to get them working at all instead of a useful
enhancement for working with large data, which is now supported on most
RISC OS applications that need it. The lack of modern kernel features
is mainly a problem to programmers - I am a programmer, yet I still
forgive it - the user still gets a working environment about as good as
any for many people's needs.
> >Some people occasionally concentrate on one graphics-intensive task.
> >They don't want to sit twiddling their thumbs while the CPU waits for
> >the graphics accelerator's far slower processor to draw the screen.
> >
>
> ROFL. You are being slightly naive here. ;-). Check out a Matrox
> Millenium sometime and then come back to me with the above assertion.
> Shucks even a 70 quid S3 Trio based board will do the job quite nicely.
My point was that some work requires you to be able to see the result
of the previous step before you can continue, so the processor being
available while a redraw is going on isn't much use to you. If a Matrox
Millenium could make redraws instantaneous, then so could a StrongARM
or good Pentium. The difference in performance wouldn't be nearly as
noticeable as the difference in cost between a dedicated high-
performance graphics card and relying on a (faster) general-purpose
processor that you've already got.
The Risc PC was never marketed as a professional graphics workstation,
so why criticise it for not being as capable as a PC with an expensive
add-on to make it into one? I don't think a family MPC from a box-
shifter is likely to have a graphics card that will significantly
outperform a Risc PC.
You're obviously no ordinary user don't forget. Most ordinary users
don't know that they can multi-task at all, so whether it's pre-emptive
or not doesn't matter to them. Neither do they need better graphics
capabilities than what's available with 2MB VRAM and limited bandwidth.
The Risc PC's more logical interface would suit them better, and if
more people used it it would generate a market for people who want,
"What everybody else has got, only better," and push development. It
would also make the job of people like you (if I've got the right
impression of what you do) easier. Or perhaps you don't want it to be
so easy that you're not needed. >:->
Phillip Temple
In message <31C012...@dev.madge.com> Ian Griffiths wrote:
> But anyway, I will correct it:
>
>
> > > Tower Electronics posted, but didn't provide any useful
> > > attribution for this:
>
> :-)
An entire set of SMTP headers was included, and the original
author's full signature. What else did you want?
> No you're right there. However, my Matrox millenium with 2MB of
> VRAM will do 1024x768 in 65536 colours too. How do you make
> your RiscPC do that? I can upgrade my Matrox Millenium to run
> at 1600x1200 in 16 million colours. How do you make your RiscPC
> do that?
How do you make your RPC do that? It is one of the Acorn pre-defined
modes. I always use 1024x768 with 65536 colours. It takes 1536k.
You can upgrade to 1600x1200 16M? I make that 1600*1200*4 bytes,
which is 7.5Mb of VRAM! Is this upgrade quite expensive?
> > and most rekon that the next generation of ART design will
> > improve on this again.
>
> Do they? I'm sure you'd like to think that. ART have suggested
> that a 4MB VRAM system is a possibility. That will be an
> improvement, but it will still be behind today's possibilities
> on PCs. Furthermore, the lack of a graphics accelerator will
> start to be a problem when more VRAM is available, because the
> processor will be having to work twice as hard, and since for
> graphics it's mostly bus limited, the StrongARM won't make
> things any better.
ART can put in 4Mb easily enough if needed, using 2 interleaved
banks. Whether the VIDC will be able to take advantage of this
is another question...
--
Phillip Temple
Tony Houghton
In article <31C17C...@dev.madge.com>
Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
> Tony Houghton wrote:
> >
> > How are you going to make your already very responsive PC 4-5x
> > faster for under 300UKP at the end of summer? ;)
>
> It's already faster than all my Acorn machines. :-)
Evasion!
> Yes 4MB is better than 2. It's not as good as 8. On a 32 bit
> system, it will be slower with 4MB than a PC 4MB graphics card.
Not necessarily, it depends on far too many variables to make that
generalisation.
> My point was that for the majority of graphics output, the bus
> is saturated with existing ARMs. A StrongARM will just be
> stalled for more clock cycles, it won't actually go any faster,
> except for stuff which really is slow enough on current machines
> to be limited by processor speed.
All the evidence proves you wrong.
> Artworks (once it works) will
> probably go faster on things like graduated fills. Dragging
> windows around will not get very much faster (except perhaps
> when you're dragging it over complex windows) and indeed will
> get a lot slower when 4MB VRAM machines turn up, unless Acorn do
> something to make the bus faster.
They said they would. There doesn't seem much point in making the bus
faster than the RAM, but they are at least going to use EDO in future.
Richard Travers
Phillip Temple (ho...@infopark.demon.co.uk) wrote:
> How do you make your RPC do that? It is one of the Acorn pre-defined
> modes. I always use 1024x768 with 65536 colours. It takes 1536k.
Hey, have I missed something here? My RPC will run in 32K colours and
16M colours, but I'm damned if I can get it to run in 64K colours.
Not that I actually want it to, of course ;-)
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Richard Travers |*ZFC*| 01736 | Obfuscation |
| ri...@argonet.co.uk |**B**| 757941 | to order |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stuart Halliday
Richard Travers (ri...@argonet.co.uk) wrote the following...
> Phillip Temple (ho...@infopark.demon.co.uk) wrote:
>
> > How do you make your RPC do that? It is one of the Acorn pre-defined
> > modes. I always use 1024x768 with 65536 colours. It takes 1536k.
>
> Hey, have I missed something here? My RPC will run in 32K colours and
> 16M colours, but I'm damned if I can get it to run in 64K colours.
>
> Not that I actually want it to, of course ;-)
The RiscPC/A7000 doesn't have a 64,000 colour mode. He must have been mistaken
or he was talking about a PC.
BTW, doesn't a PC video card running a 64,000 colour mode only have a 18-bit
Palette? I remember a PC programmer complaining about this when he had to
support 64K colour modes in a DOS program.
Oops! Dropped off newgroup topic! ;-)
--
Stuart Halliday - Web Master of the
___ ___ _ __ ___ _ _
/ _ \ __ ___ _ _ _ _ / __| _| |__ ___ _ \ \ / (_) | |__ _ __ _ ___
| _ / _/ _ \ '_| ' \ | (_| || | '_ \/ -_) '_\ V /| | | / _` / _` / -_)
|_| |_\__\___/_| |_||_| \___\_, |_.__/\___|_| \_/ |_|_|_\__,_\__, \___|
|__/ |___/
http://www.cybervillage.co.uk/acorn/
ftp://quantum:qua...@ftp.cybervillage.co.uk/pub
Peter Smith
In message <internews...@argonet.co.uk> Richard Travers wrote:
> Phillip Temple (ho...@infopark.demon.co.uk) wrote:
>
> > How do you make your RPC do that? It is one of the Acorn pre-defined
> > modes. I always use 1024x768 with 65536 colours. It takes 1536k.
>
> Hey, have I missed something here? My RPC will run in 32K colours and
> 16M colours, but I'm damned if I can get it to run in 64K colours.
>
> Not that I actually want it to, of course ;-)
Seeing as how the RPC uses 16bits for a 32k colour screenmode, strictly
speaking there _are_ 64k colours. There are 5 bits each of red, green and
blue, and as far as I understand the remaining bit used as a mask (alpha
channel?).
Similarly 24bit colour takes up 1876k. This is because there are 8
bits each of red, green and blue, and an 8 bit alpha channel. Well handy.
(Alledgedly :-)
--
___ _ ___ _ _ _
| _ \___| |_ ___ _ _ / __|_ __ (_) |_| |_
| _/ -_) _/ -_) '_| \__ \ ' \| | _| ' \
|_| \___|\__\___|_| |___/_|_|_|_|\__|_||_|
Phillip Temple
In message <internews...@argonet.co.uk> Richard Travers wrote:
> Phillip Temple (ho...@infopark.demon.co.uk) wrote:
>
> > How do you make your RPC do that? It is one of the Acorn pre-defined
> > modes. I always use 1024x768 with 65536 colours. It takes 1536k.
>
> Hey, have I missed something here? My RPC will run in 32K colours and
> 16M colours, but I'm damned if I can get it to run in 64K colours.
Oops! Slip of the calculator. I meant 32k colours of course. 64k colours
would be a little silly.
Talking about screen modes, what would be ideal for piping through to
a TV set? Say you wanted to put a hi-res slideshow on.
--
Phillip Temple
Greg Hennessy
In article <26e54...@tonyh.tcp.co.uk>,
Tony Houghton <to...@tcp.co.uk> writes:
>In article <Dsz92...@systems.DHL.COM>
> ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com (Greg Hennessy) wrote:
>
>> Note I did say 'WWW servers', not the browser. Netscape running over X does
>> not count here. I wasn't the one to make a comparison with the ultra sparc
>> but seeing that someone is trying to make an apples to apples comparison,
>> Any current or future ARM based system is likely to be found wanting as
>> commercial applications or DBMS server platform. NT for Strongarm is
>> just not going to happen.
>
>Point taken, but there is an HTML server for RISC OS. How it compares
>with Netscape I don't know, but all the web pages I've ever seen merely
>consist of a server chucking data at me when asked and occasionally
>running a script. There's no reason the RISC OS version couldn't do
>that.
>
Well here's the list of features of Netscape Enterpise WWW Server
( Courtesy of a cut & paste from www.netscape.com)
Provides advanced capabilities for content creation and management
Including WYSIWYG editing, full text search, and revision control
Extends development platform to include open, server-side applications
First server to support Java and Javascript applications
Increases security and network management capabilities
Including SSL 3.0, client-side certificates, and advanced access control
Support for secure, remote, cross-platform administration, SNMP, and reporting
Employs second generation performance enhancements
Including multi-processor support
A simple www server is very easy to write. However a feature list similiar
to the above on Risc-os is extremely unlikely.
>
>Computers are becoming more data centred than application centred. If
>you're starting with a WWW interface and making it into something that
>depends on proprietary 'standards' you're headed in the wrong
>
>direction. Maybe you had no choice at the time.
>
Well in most organisations that use PC's, Office or something like it is a
'de facto' standard, to say otherwise is being unrealistic :-) . I just use
the WWW to allow the userbase to integrate the facilities they already have
sat on their desk.
>Undoubtedly RISC OS would be better off with PMT, VM and Threading. But
>for some reason every OS that has these features suffers from bloat.
Plase define bloat in this modern age of 1GB hard disk's for ~100 quid
and 16mb of memory for not much more. I work with a broad base of users
that range from someone who can barely switch their machine on to others
who are very switched on :-) and I can say that almost every feature
of the MS-Office applications are being utilised. Including director's
who definitely know their OLE from their elbow. :-)
> VM
>is just a necessity to get them working at all instead of a useful
>enhancement for working with large data, which is now supported on most
>RISC OS applications that need it.
But IIRC on risc-os this facility could be quantified as a 'miserable hack'.
VM is not something to patched on the outside of an OS at some later stage.
Have you ever used a properly configured NT system ? it's a joy to behold (
note no hint of Irony here :-) , Very quick, responsive and performs
well under load. And this on my Dx4/100 with collection of bits at home.
> The lack of modern kernel features
>is mainly a problem to programmers - I am a programmer, yet I still
>forgive it - the user still gets a working environment about as good as
>any for many people's needs.
>
It's these modern features that make life a lot easier for people
like administrators, Ever see BackOffice in action ? Set up an NT system
so Joe User cannot play and therefore make ones life a misery :-).
>>
>> ROFL. You are being slightly naive here. ;-). Check out a Matrox
>> Millenium sometime and then come back to me with the above assertion.
>> Shucks even a 70 quid S3 Trio based board will do the job quite nicely.
>
>My point was that some work requires you to be able to see the result
>of the previous step before you can continue, so the processor being
>available while a redraw is going on isn't much use to you.
Yup it is if you have a PMT system. It spools your print jobs, gets
your mail, Runs your WWW servers etc etc....
> If a Matrox
>Millenium could make redraws instantaneous, then so could a StrongARM
>or good Pentium.
> The difference in performance wouldn't be nearly as
>noticeable as the difference in cost between a dedicated high-
>performance graphics card and relying on a (faster) general-purpose
>processor that you've already got.
>
The difference is quite notable, Note Microsoft's objection to Intel's
attempt to push UMA ( Unified Memory Architecture , A design not unlike
certain systems out of cambridge :-) ) motherboards a few months back.
Then of course there is the whole area of DirectX and 3D, A dedicated
board rendering textured polygons is a lot more sensible than tieing
up the CPU.
>
>The Risc PC was never marketed as a professional graphics workstation,
>so why criticise it for not being as capable as a PC with an expensive
>add-on to make it into one? I don't think a family MPC from a box-
>shifter is likely to have a graphics card that will significantly
>outperform a Risc PC.
>
But again let's make an apples for apples comparison, Given the cost of an
RPC I can have a PC that will quite literally blow it away feature wise an
still have change left over.
>You're obviously no ordinary user don't forget. Most ordinary users
>don't know that they can multi-task at all, so whether it's pre-emptive
>or not doesn't matter to them.
My experience here says otherwise, I have seen secretaries bitching about
the fact that they can run multiple apps under Windows 3.1 with resource
problems. Now they might not know the nitty-gritty with the USER and GDI 64k
heap size but they are clued in well enough to know that they can and do run
multiple windows apps side by side.
> Neither do they need better graphics
>capabilities than what's available with 2MB VRAM and limited bandwidth.
>The Risc PC's more logical interface would suit them better, and if
>more people used it it would generate a market for people who want,
>"What everybody else has got, only better," and push development. It
>would also make the job of people like you (if I've got the right
>impression of what you do) easier. Or perhaps you don't want it to be
>so easy that you're not needed. >:->
>
Again such naivety :-), One has to make use of what one is given, It doesn't
matter whether one has a 1000 mac's, pc's or for that matter though unlikely
:-) 1000 RPC's on users desks out there the adminstration burden does
not go away.
Alex T. Smith
Stuart Halliday sat in the shadows typing :
[ snip ]
> BTW, doesn't a PC video card running a 64,000 colour mode only have a 18-bit
> Palette? I remember a PC programmer complaining about this when he had to
> support 64K colour modes in a DOS program.
There's no reason why not. AFAIK a 65536 (2^16) colour mode is like a
RiscPC 32768 colour mode except that the extra bit is actually added on
to one of the colour components. So it might be 6 bits red, 5 for green
and 5 for blue. A possible complaint is that producing a grey scale isn't
so straight forward.
ObAcorn: Didn't one of the ColourCard or G8 have 65536 capability ?
Alex.
--
Somebody, somewhere is watching Star Trek.
Ian Griffiths
Tony Houghton wrote:
>
> Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
>
> > Tony Houghton wrote:
> > >
> > > How are you going to make your already very responsive PC
> > > 4-5x faster for under 300UKP at the end of summer? ;)
> >
> > It's already faster than all my Acorn machines. :-)
>
> Evasion!
OK. I already bought the fast model. I could have bought the
uniprocessor version and then upgraded; as it happens I bought
it with both processor sockets already occupied.
So that doesn't quadruple my speed, but here's my answer to
that:
I can buy a Pentium Pro machine now. I will have to wait until
the end of the summer to get my 4-5x faster RiscPC. If I buy a
StrongARM RiscPC, what can I do THEN to make it 4-5x faster?
The only reason you have that option is that you already bought
the slow machine. I don't currently have a RiscPC, and the one
I intend to get will come with a StrongARM fitted. There won't
be any option for massive speed increase on that because, just
like with my PC, I will already have bought the fast one.
Hell, I could removed both processors from my PC and plug in a
P60, and then say "Behold! Marvel at the impressive
expandability of my machine - I can plug in 2 P166s, and boost
the performance more than fourfold!". Great, thanks, but
frankly I can't be bothered - I'd just like to buy the fast
machine straight away if that's alright. That's just what I'll
be doing when I get my StrongARM-powered RiscPC.
The fact that PC processors have shown strong and steady growth
for years now, whereas ARMs have shown long periods of largely
disappointing change, punctuated by the odd spectacular leap
(The first ARM, ARM3 and StrongARM spring to mind) is not, to my
mind, especially compeeling. The fact is that when the ARM2
appeared, it was, by all available benchmarks, faster than the
opposition (processors in other personal computers), whereas
now, the StrongARM is up there with its competitors, but
certainly not in the lead. The fact that we're seeing a massive
leap seems in this context to indicate that we just had a lot of
catching up to do.
> > Yes 4MB is better than 2. It's not as good as 8. On a 32
> > bit system, it will be slower with 4MB than a PC 4MB
> > graphics card.
>
> Not necessarily, it depends on far too many variables to make
> that generalisation.
Which particular generalisation? More VRAM = better? OK, only
if you actually want to use it.
Speed comparisons? OK, well I'll specify a 4MB 64 bit PC
graphics system which narrows it down, and claim that simple
graphics operations (your basic primitives) will be faster.
This is a narrower claim, but I think it's indisputable. Does
anyone want to dispute it? The wider claim is, admittedly, open
to debate.
> > My point was that for the majority of graphics output, the
> > bus is saturated with existing ARMs. A StrongARM will just
> > be stalled for more clock cycles, it won't actually go any
> > faster, except for stuff which really is slow enough on
> > current machines to be limited by processor speed.
>
> All the evidence proves you wrong.
What evidence would that be? ART's StrongARM test result pages?
Test A - Dhrystones. This has nothing to do with graphics and
is therefore irrelevant.
Tests B and C - JPEG decoding. Not exactly bus limited - JPEG
decode is processor intensive. (Anything that takes on the
order of a second to do what is, when all is said and done,
plotting a sprite to the screen is clearly not being choked by
graphics bandwidth.) The fact that the high colour version runs
faster despite needing to output more bytes shows that the bus
here is not the problem.
Tests D and E - drawing the Artworks Apple. I'll just let my
quoted comments appear:
> > Artworks (once it works) will probably go faster on things
> > like graduated fills.
Evidence proving me wrong is it? :-)
For complex pictures, particularly those involving grad fills
and blends involve quite a lot of processor work not directly
involved with writing the data to the screen.
Conclusion from the data I have: the StrongARM's a lot faster
for Artworks and JPEG work.
What I'm more interested in though is in how fast it is to
redraw and scroll through an Impression document, which in
general involves some simpler output, mostly font-based. (This
is one big reason I have for wanting a graphics accelerator -
these typically hold some of the font cache on the graphics card
and blit directly from there, which can go just stunning fast.)
My guess is that you won't see improvements on anything like the
same scale, if they're noticeable at all.
Of course this is all based on reasoning, rather than
measurement, so I'd be interested to hear real results. The
only ones I've seen so far though are not relevant to what I'm
talking about.
It's entirely possible that I've been overestimating the
efficiency of RiscOS's display code, and that the
processor-video memory bandwidth has never before been a
bottleneck, in which case, all my reasoning will be groundless.
> > get a lot slower when 4MB VRAM machines turn up, unless
> > Acorn do something to make the bus faster.
>
> They said they would. There doesn't seem much point in making
> the bus faster than the RAM, but they are at least going to
> use EDO in future.
That'll help a bit, in that it will further alleviate need for
an L2 cache, but I assume that the video memory will be accessed
at the same speed as before, so that bottleneck remains the
same.
--
Ian Griffiths
Ian Griffiths
Phillip Temple wrote:
>
> Ian Griffiths wrote:
> > I can upgrade my Matrox Millenium to run at 1600x1200 in 16
>
> You can upgrade to 1600x1200 16M?
Yup.
> I make that 1600*1200*4 bytes, which is 7.5Mb of VRAM!
Yup.
> Is this upgrade quite expensive?
Yup.
Comes as a 6MB upgrade, to make a total of 8MB. I'm pretty sure
I can't afford it this quarter, so I don't know what the current
prices are.
--
Ian Griffiths
Ian Griffiths
> > (except perhaps when you're dragging it over complex
> > windows)
>
I don't particularly. I just don't want it to get slower
either.
If you hadn't deleted what I followed on with, it would have
been clear that I was pointing out that doubling the amount of
VRAM, and hence (presumably) doubling the colour depth most
people run at will double the amount of work needing to be done
to move a window around.
At this point you have a choice
1) Put up with windows moving at half the speed they used to
2) Do something to make it faster
In other words, I'm saying that increasing VRAM in isolation
will put more strain on the bus, and result in reduced perceived
performance. A StrongARM won't make much difference because the
bus is the bottleneck in this situation.
If it's still fast enough then I guess that's fine. So long as
big windows still move about as smoothly as the mouse pointer
most of the time then I'm happy. (In other words this is a
theoretical discussion - I don't actually know what window drags
will be like on a 4MB VRAM machine.)
Obviously window drags aren't the only thing - stuff like
filling areas and sprite plotting are in a similar situation.
It's your whole general desktop drawing nuts and bolts I'm
concerned about. Dragging windows around is just the obvious
example. Scrolling is another example, and probably more
relevant.
--
Ian Griffiths
Ian Lynch
Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
> If you hadn't deleted what I followed on with, it would have been clear
> that I was pointing out that doubling the amount of VRAM, and hence
> (presumably) doubling the colour depth most people run at will double
> the amount of work needing to be done to move a window around.
This assumes most people work in 24 bit most of the time. I actually
work in 256 colours most of the time because to be honest, spatial
resolution is far more important when writing reports, E-mailing and
reading Usenet which is what I and I suspect many others do most of
the time. I am calling into question whether *most* people need 4 Mb
of VRAM at all. I don't think they do.
> (In other words this is a theoretical discussion - I don't
> actually know what window drags will be like on a 4MB VRAM
machine.)
.
I think we perhaps agree then :-)
--
Ian
Ian Lynch
Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
>> Is this upgrade quite expensive?
> Yup.
> Comes as a 6MB upgrade, to make a total of 8MB. I'm pretty sure I
> can't afford it this quarter, so I don't know what the current prices
> are.
If money is no problem why not just by a Silicon Graphics Workstation?
--
Ian
Chris Audley
In article <Dt4tn...@systems.DHL.COM>, Greg Hennessy
<mailto:ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com> wrote:
>
> In article <26e54...@tonyh.tcp.co.uk>,
> Tony Houghton <to...@tcp.co.uk> writes:
> >In article <Dsz92...@systems.DHL.COM>
> > ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com (Greg Hennessy) wrote:
> >
> >> Note I did say 'WWW servers', not the browser. Netscape running over X does
> >> not count here. I wasn't the one to make a comparison with the ultra sparc
> >> but seeing that someone is trying to make an apples to apples comparison,
> >> Any current or future ARM based system is likely to be found wanting as
> >> commercial applications or DBMS server platform. NT for Strongarm is
> >> just not going to happen.
> >
> >Point taken, but there is an HTML server for RISC OS. How it compares
> >with Netscape I don't know, but all the web pages I've ever seen merely
> >consist of a server chucking data at me when asked and occasionally
> >running a script. There's no reason the RISC OS version couldn't do
> >that.
> >
>
> Well here's the list of features of Netscape Enterpise WWW Server
> ( Courtesy of a cut & paste from www.netscape.com)
>
> Provides advanced capabilities for content creation and management
> Including WYSIWYG editing, full text search, and revision control
Not really anything to do with serving is it - just another app(s) that
give you a better front end to managing the WWW pages, and writing HTML.
There is already a HTML editor available for RISC OS, and what more do you
need than the filer to manage your WWW files :)
> Extends development platform to include open, server-side applications
> First server to support Java and Javascript applications
Haven't really looked at the protocol for serving apps, but I can't imagine
its all that different to serving normal docs. (I have a nasty feeling I'm
going to be proved wrong on that)
> Increases security and network management capabilities
> Including SSL 3.0, client-side certificates, and advanced access control
> Support for secure, remote, cross-platform administration, SNMP, and
> reporting
Quite useful, just a hassle to write, and if you don't need it, it'll just
bloat the app, unless it allows you to 'plug' them in.
Also some of their security stuff is proprietry, so unless someone can hack
it and work out how it works, its unlikely it will appear in any other
server on any platform.
> Employs second generation performance enhancements
Doesn't tell you much, but if its anything like their proxy server, it'll be
using a minimum number of server processes (which have a limited service life
before they die - to stop machines with leaky libraries falling over), and then
it'll start up more processes for transient connections - quite neat, I'm
trying to think of a nice fast way of doing it under RISC OS.
> Including multi-processor support
Mmmmmm, more likely provided by the underlying OS, one feature we probably
won't see for RISC OS :(
> A simple www server is very easy to write. However a feature list similiar
> to the above on Risc-os is extremely unlikely.
Granted, the core of the server with all the 'complicated' sockety stuff
takes very little time to write, its writing all the CGI, Image Map,
authentication and supporting the various headers that takes times - lucky
I've got most of the summer left :)
Note that the Enterprise server costs 995 US dollars, OK so there are cheaper
ones available (cheapest from Netscape is 295 US dollars) but you are still
paying a lot for those extra features - especially when you consider the HTTP
servers for RISC OS are, or are next to, free.
BTW whilst I've been writing software using HTTP, the servers that have
caused me the most hassle by not fully complying to the RFCs have more often
than not been Netscape ones - but then they like setting their own standards
don't they :)
cya
--
Chris Audley, PartII Engineering student, mailto:ch...@santaari.tcp.co.uk
psychotic cyclist & Acorn RiscPC user http://www.tcp.co.uk/~santaari/chris/
Navaho WWW & Proxy Server home page: http://www.tcp.co.uk/~santaari/navaho/
Ian Lynch
Pe...@hstein.demon.co.uk (Peter Smith) wrote:
> Similarly 24bit colour takes up 1876k. This is because there are 8 bits
> each of red, green and blue, and an 8 bit alpha channel. Well handy.
> (Alledgedly :-)
Certainly is for TV and video.
--
Ian
Tony Houghton
In article <Dt4tn...@systems.DHL.COM>
ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com (Greg Hennessy) wrote:
> Well here's the list of features of Netscape Enterpise WWW Server
> ( Courtesy of a cut & paste from www.netscape.com)
>
> Provides advanced capabilities for content creation and management
> Including WYSIWYG editing, full text search, and revision control
> Extends development platform to include open, server-side applications
> First server to support Java and Javascript applications
> Increases security and network management capabilities
> Including SSL 3.0, client-side certificates, and advanced access
> control
> Support for secure, remote, cross-platform administration, SNMP, and
> reporting
> Employs second generation performance enhancements
> Including multi-processor support
>
>
> A simple www server is very easy to write. However a feature list similiar
> to the above on Risc-os is extremely unlikely.
The fact that RISC OS doesn't have such a server isn't a disaster for
the platform. There's nothing to stop you connecting RISC OS clients to
NT servers. I do agree that that would be far more sensible than using
RISC OS to run a server. A server can benefit from features of Windows
NT, but not from features of RISC OS, namely its better GUI.
> Well in most organisations that use PC's, Office or something like it is a
> 'de facto' standard, to say otherwise is being unrealistic :-) . I just use
> the WWW to allow the userbase to integrate the facilities they already have
> sat on their desk.
It's a shame they can get away with calling something a standard when
its file formats and source code etc are so jealously guarded.
> >Undoubtedly RISC OS would be better off with PMT, VM and Threading. But
> >for some reason every OS that has these features suffers from bloat.
>
> Plase define bloat in this modern age of 1GB hard disk's for ~100 quid
> and 16mb of memory for not much more. I work with a broad base of users
> that range from someone who can barely switch their machine on to others
> who are very switched on :-) and I can say that almost every feature
> of the MS-Office applications are being utilised. Including director's
> who definitely know their OLE from their elbow. :-)
I'd define bloat as something that has :
> secretaries bitching about
> the fact that they can run multiple apps under Windows 3.1 with resource
> problems
There isn't much advantage to not needing much disc space nowadays
(except they last longer through not being thrashed so much, but that's
irrelevant to PCs), but you can get 4MB SIMMs for about 30UKP now.
That's better than having to spend >100UKP for the same functionality
isn't it?
> But IIRC on risc-os this facility could be quantified as a 'miserable hack'.
So what? It does the job, there's nothing miserable about it for the
user who doesn't care what's "under the bonnet".
The whole of Windows could be quantified as a 'miserable hack' on top
of DOS.
> >My point was that some work requires you to be able to see the result
> >of the previous step before you can continue, so the processor being
> >available while a redraw is going on isn't much use to you.
>
> Yup it is if you have a PMT system. It spools your print jobs, gets
> your mail, Runs your WWW servers etc etc....
I don't think there's an overpowering majority of people who do all
those things at once just because they can. Most people would rather
have all the power of the machine concentrated on their demanding
graphics job. Are you going to tell me that NT doesn't slow down the
more tasks it runs, and also claim that its (multi-processor) thread
scheduling makes best use of all configurations?
> The difference is quite notable, Note Microsoft's objection to Intel's
> attempt to push UMA ( Unified Memory Architecture , A design not unlike
> certain systems out of cambridge :-) ) motherboards a few months back.
No, I didn't note it. What is UMA? I think you're being rather naive if
you believe that Microsoft wanted to avoid rewriting their kernel for a
new architecture solely because the old one was better.
> Then of course there is the whole area of DirectX and 3D, A dedicated
> board rendering textured polygons is a lot more sensible than tieing
> up the CPU.
Must be very useful for MS Office.
> Again such naivety :-), One has to make use of what one is given, It doesn't
> matter whether one has a 1000 mac's, pc's or for that matter though unlikely
> :-) 1000 RPC's on users desks out there the adminstration burden does
> not go away.
Again, such naivety :-) Some platforms do create more problems than
others. Maybe NT is relatively trouble-free when properly set up, but
that's because it was written for power users who need something bullet
proof and are likely to be good at setting it up properly. How many
secretaries outside your company use it for word-processing etc? The
vast majority use Windows 3.1 or 95, which were written for people who
will just use what they're told to and won't be disappointed when the
computer lives up to their expectations of having a mind of its own.
Tony Houghton
In article <31C553...@dev.madge.com>
Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
> Tony Houghton wrote:
>
> Hell, I could removed both processors from my PC and plug in a
> P60, and then say "Behold! Marvel at the impressive
> expandability of my machine - I can plug in 2 P166s, and boost
> the performance more than fourfold!". Great, thanks, but
> frankly I can't be bothered - I'd just like to buy the fast
> machine straight away if that's alright. That's just what I'll
> be doing when I get my StrongARM-powered RiscPC.
Oh, so you are going to buy one? Sorry, I thought you were rubbishing
them.
> > > Yes 4MB is better than 2. It's not as good as 8. On a 32
> > > bit system, it will be slower with 4MB than a PC 4MB
> > > graphics card.
> >
> > Not necessarily, it depends on far too many variables to make
> > that generalisation.
>
> Which particular generalisation? More VRAM = better? OK, only
> if you actually want to use it.
>
> Speed comparisons? OK, well I'll specify a 4MB 64 bit PC
> graphics system which narrows it down, and claim that simple
> graphics operations (your basic primitives) will be faster.
> This is a narrower claim, but I think it's indisputable. Does
> anyone want to dispute it? The wider claim is, admittedly, open
> to debate.
Wouldn't simple primitives be the sort of things that would fit nicely
in the StrongARM's caches? Perhaps you mean large blits and things, in
which case I'd agree with you. But if you meant line drawing primitives
I'd disagree.
> Conclusion from the data I have: the StrongARM's a lot faster
> for Artworks and JPEG work.
>
> What I'm more interested in though is in how fast it is to
> redraw and scroll through an Impression document, which in
> general involves some simpler output, mostly font-based. (This
> is one big reason I have for wanting a graphics accelerator -
> these typically hold some of the font cache on the graphics card
> and blit directly from there, which can go just stunning fast.)
> My guess is that you won't see improvements on anything like the
> same scale, if they're noticeable at all.
Someone said that he tried changing the base font size of a large
Impression document at one of the shows and the update speed was
amazing.
> Of course this is all based on reasoning, rather than
> measurement, so I'd be interested to hear real results. The
> only ones I've seen so far though are not relevant to what I'm
> talking about.
That seems true, but if the only tests that had been done were thing
that were expected to be fast anyway, there wouldn't be so much
delighted surprise at the better than expected performance. Or perhaps
it's just that tasks that require good bus bandwidth more than anything
else aren't really used on this platform, which would make it true of
most mid-range PC users as well.
> It's entirely possible that I've been overestimating the
> efficiency of RiscOS's display code, and that the
> processor-video memory bandwidth has never before been a
> bottleneck, in which case, all my reasoning will be groundless.
The fact that it has to cope with things like mode-independence and
rectangles that don't have their boundaries word-aligned would add a
bit to the amount of code having to be executed.
An alternative theory is that even with the bottleneck, things that
rely on the bandwidth and not on CPU speed can already be done in the
blink of an eye anyway, so having a bottleneck doesn't really matter.
The stuff that we usually have to wait for is calculation of what to
plot where, and that's what the StrongARM is good at.
Iain Anderson
Tony Houghton (to...@tcp.co.uk) wrote:
: In article <31C012...@dev.madge.com>
: Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
: How are you going to make your already very responsive PC 4-5x faster
: for under 300UKP at the end of summer? ;)
Tee hee. How about "buy 32MB of DRAM". This could well make the machine 5x
faster under certain conditions :)
: > Furthermore, the lack of a graphics accelerator will
: > start to be a problem when more VRAM is available, because the
: > processor will be having to work twice as hard, and since for
: > graphics it's mostly bus limited, the StrongARM won't make
: > things any better.
: It will in fact. My money's on the StrongARM being faster than a Matrox
: Millenium. I don't think that just because it's a dedicated graphics
: card it means it can magically handle 4-8MB VRAM just as fast as 1-2MB.
Can anyone think of a good way of making this comparison ? I would guess that
the Matrox would outperform the SA, but it would be interesting to see how
they compare - and it would certainly be interesting if Tony is right.
____
Iain
Iain Anderson
Ian Griffiths (igri...@dev.madge.com) wrote:
: Tower Electronics Ltd wrote:
: >
: > Ian Griffiths <mailto:igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
: > >
: > > Why exactly? There are already 3 high performance RISC
: > > architectures around which will run NT.
: >
: > AND HAVE YOU LOOKED AT THE PRICE TAG - go on then purchase
: Well the Sun won't run NT of course, and neither will the HP. I
: didn't think that PowerPC machines were that expensive.
: PowerMACs certainly aren't.
: > and see how much change you get out of 60,000 ukp!
: For a PowerMAC? Quite a lot actually.
: And the next generation PowerMACs will be able to run NT.
: I don't have any appropriate price lists to hand. Can you tell
: me how much a PPC-based PC costs? I was guessing at sub-2000
: UKP. I'm certain it's not 65k.
An example that we've just got :
RS/6000 43P
PowerPC 604 at 133MHz
128MB DRAM
2MB VRAM
20" monitor
Ethernet
SCSI-2, with internally CD-ROM and 2 of 2GB hard drives
AIX (blech), Solaris and Windows NT.
Lease at 2k UKP a year or buy for about 15k UKP. Bit of an easy decision
there. And yes, even with IBM's margins it's a sight less than 60 thou.
____
Iain
Greg Hennessy
In article <b182d...@tonyh.tcp.co.uk>,
Tony Houghton <to...@tcp.co.uk> writes:
>> to the above on Risc-os is extremely unlikely.
>
>The fact that RISC OS doesn't have such a server isn't a disaster for
>the platform. There's nothing to stop you connecting RISC OS clients to
>NT servers. I do agree that that would be far more sensible than using
>RISC OS to run a server. A server can benefit from features of Windows
>NT, but not from features of RISC OS, namely its better GUI.
>
Hmmm.. I don't know, NT 4.0 is pretty slick :-). You might even
be mildly impressed :-)
>
>It's a shame they can get away with calling something a standard when
>its file formats and source code etc are so jealously guarded.
>
Well C'est La Vie, It helps pay the rent for a lot of us so don't knock it
:-)
>I'd define bloat as something that has :
>
>> secretaries bitching about
>> the fact that they can run multiple apps under Windows 3.1 with resource
>> problems
>
Well that really has nothing got to do with bloat, The problem exists due to
the architectural limitations of windows 3.x. Which to give a small
bit of kudos to '95 has largely disappeared.
>There isn't much advantage to not needing much disc space nowadays
>(except they last longer through not being thrashed so much, but that's
>irrelevant to PCs), but you can get 4MB SIMMs for about 30UKP now.
>That's better than having to spend >100UKP for the same functionality
>isn't it?
>
Well you should see the cost of a site license for something like MS Office,
It's a lot less than you think per place setting. The same with items like
Netscape Navigator.
>> But IIRC on risc-os this facility could be quantified as a 'miserable hack'.
>
>So what? It does the job, there's nothing miserable about it for the
>user who doesn't care what's "under the bonnet".
>
But you being the application developer :-) would agree that applications
should not have to be specially engineered to use something that should
be there as standard.
>The whole of Windows could be quantified as a 'miserable hack' on top
>of DOS.
>
:-) I won't disagree there :-)
>I don't think there's an overpowering majority of people who do all
>those things at once just because they can. Most people would rather
>have all the power of the machine concentrated on their demanding
>graphics job.
IMHO it's a question of perception, The 'overpowering majority of people'
generally do not do 'demanding graphics jobs'. It's usually the more
mundane stuff like Word, XL etc.
Are you going to tell me that NT doesn't slow down the
>more tasks it runs, and also claim that its (multi-processor) thread
>scheduling makes best use of all configurations?
>
Nah the next thing I will assert is that NT is so fast it does an infinite
loop in 5 seconds :-) .But seriously it depends on the task, You will find
that the majority of software for most of the runtime is I/O not compute
bound. NT performs quite well under load. But as you say it's a question of
horses for courses.
>> The difference is quite notable, Note Microsoft's objection to Intel's
>> attempt to push UMA ( Unified Memory Architecture , A design not unlike
>> certain systems out of cambridge :-) ) motherboards a few months back.
>
>No, I didn't note it. What is UMA? I think you're being rather naive if
>you believe that Microsoft wanted to avoid rewriting their kernel for a
>new architecture solely because the old one was better.
>
IIRC Intel are pushing UMA as a cheaper way to make motherboards. UMA
boards have the System and the Video controller sharing the same memory.
Needless to say as resolution an colour depth increased system performance
goes out the window ( figuratively speaking :-) )
>> Then of course there is the whole area of DirectX and 3D, A dedicated
>> board rendering textured polygons is a lot more sensible than tieing
>> up the CPU.
>
>Must be very useful for MS Office.
>
Well I am not the one wanting to tie up the CPU to render graphics :-)
>
>Again, such naivety :-) Some platforms do create more problems than
>others. Maybe NT is relatively trouble-free when properly set up, but
>that's because it was written for power users who need something bullet
>proof and are likely to be good at setting it up properly.
Well you may have to get used to it. I hear a lot of noises from companies
that are going to skip the transition from win 3.x to '95 and go direct to
NT 4.0.
>How many
>secretaries outside your company use it for word-processing etc? The
>vast majority use Windows 3.1 or 95, which were written for people who
>will just use what they're told to and won't be disappointed when the
>computer lives up to their expectations of having a mind of its own.
>
Well given that assertion would you not agree that the future for
a platform like the RPC is rather bleak.
Toby Haynes
In article <31C553...@dev.madge.com>,
Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
>> > My point was that for the majority of graphics output, the
>> > bus is saturated with existing ARMs. A StrongARM will just
>> > be stalled for more clock cycles, it won't actually go any
>> > faster, except for stuff which really is slow enough on
>> > current machines to be limited by processor speed.
>> All the evidence proves you wrong.
>What evidence would that be? ART's StrongARM test result pages?
>Test A - Dhrystones. This has nothing to do with graphics and
>is therefore irrelevant.
Indeed - dhrystones is a good test for the CPU in *isolation* to it's
surroundings - it's useless at comparing complete systems. It is still
possible to inflate a CPU's dhrystones results with specific compiler
optimisations so it's not unbiased from a compiler point of view
either. I suspect that several compilers are dhrystone-enhanced to
make them more attractive in what is after all a fairly widely known
benchmark. I don't believe that Acorn Cv5 has any specific dhrystone
compiler options though ... ;-)
>Tests B and C - JPEG decoding. Not exactly bus limited - JPEG
>decode is processor intensive. (Anything that takes on the
>order of a second to do what is, when all is said and done,
>plotting a sprite to the screen is clearly not being choked by
>graphics bandwidth.) The fact that the high colour version runs
>faster despite needing to output more bytes shows that the bus
>here is not the problem.
>Tests D and E - drawing the Artworks Apple. I'll just let my
>quoted comments appear:
>> > Artworks (once it works) will probably go faster on things
>> > like graduated fills.
>Evidence proving me wrong is it? :-)
Absolutely not! ;-)
[snip]
>Conclusion from the data I have: the StrongARM's a lot faster
>for Artworks and JPEG work.
>What I'm more interested in though is in how fast it is to
>redraw and scroll through an Impression document, which in
>general involves some simpler output, mostly font-based. (This
>is one big reason I have for wanting a graphics accelerator -
>these typically hold some of the font cache on the graphics card
>and blit directly from there, which can go just stunning fast.)
>My guess is that you won't see improvements on anything like the
>same scale, if they're noticeable at all.
Having stood and played around with the StrongARM machine at the ARM
'96 show in Cambridge, I would say that the improvement in speed in
window redrawing is not only noticeable, but dramatic. Having watched
Chris Cox drag windows all over the place with barely a noticeable
judder (it only really became noticeable in the fraction of a second
it redraws Draw windows) I was impressed. I also was impressed with
the Tumble Demo, which if my coding is anything to go by, should be
spending a large part of it's time reading and writing to
memory. Similarly, people who got to play with Style on the machine at
Wakefield reported that it was silky smooth in scrolling a 70 page
document - including pictures and text. This certainly is encouraging
- and maybe points again to Risc OS and apps not being as hard on
memory accesses as was feared. Or maybe that DSP Multiply unit is
doing stormingly good work.
Of course, nobody has had their hands on the machine (outside Acorn of
course) for long enough to discover where the bottlenecks are now in
the system. Whether the improvements in scrolling speed are up to the
4-5 times for some of the other benchmarks is also not clear. I also
think that as the amount of VRAM steps up, a graphics accelerator/
caching system will become increasingly necessary to prevent things
crawling in memory intensive modes. In 8Mb modes (ie 1600x1200 @
32bpp) you are throwing a huge amount of memory around (about 500MB/s)
- both memory bandwidth and processor bandwidth need to be superb to
cope with this at these sorts of resolutions, and our Risc PC's won't
cope at the moment. Since this is not the sort of thing that everyone
is going to want/need, it shouldn't comprise a fundamental part of the
motherboard - it's far better that it is in a high-speed podule with
fast access into the rest of the system, and need only be bought by
those who have to have it.
Cheers,
Toby
--
Toby Haynes | "I COULD MURDER A CURRY" - Death
Somewhere in Cambridge | Mort by Terry Pratchett
Tony Houghton
In article <Dt6qz...@systems.DHL.COM>
ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com (Greg Hennessy) wrote:
> In article <b182d...@tonyh.tcp.co.uk>,
> Tony Houghton <to...@tcp.co.uk> writes:
> >> to the above on Risc-os is extremely unlikely.
> >
> >The fact that RISC OS doesn't have such a server isn't a disaster for
> >the platform. There's nothing to stop you connecting RISC OS clients to
> >NT servers. I do agree that that would be far more sensible than using
> >RISC OS to run a server. A server can benefit from features of Windows
> >NT, but not from features of RISC OS, namely its better GUI.
> >
>
> Hmmm.. I don't know, NT 4.0 is pretty slick :-). You might even
> be mildly impressed :-)
Is that the new version whose interface is more like Windows 95? If it
is, then it must be quite nice.
> >There isn't much advantage to not needing much disc space nowadays
> >(except they last longer through not being thrashed so much, but that's
> >irrelevant to PCs), but you can get 4MB SIMMs for about 30UKP now.
> >That's better than having to spend >100UKP for the same functionality
> >isn't it?
> >
>
> Well you should see the cost of a site license for something like MS Office,
> It's a lot less than you think per place setting. The same with items like
> Netscape Navigator.
What's that got to do with their RAM requirements?
> But you being the application developer :-) would agree that applications
> should not have to be specially engineered to use something that should
> be there as standard.
I don't have to specifically engineer my applications for VM. All I need
is a good memory management library using Dynamic Areas while being
backwards compatible with older systems. I've just been writing one. You
can even patch the Standard C Library to use Dynamic Areas.
> IMHO it's a question of perception, The 'overpowering majority of people'
> generally do not do 'demanding graphics jobs'. It's usually the more
> mundane stuff like Word, XL etc.
They don't need a powerful graphics accelerator either.
> IIRC Intel are pushing UMA as a cheaper way to make motherboards. UMA
> boards have the System and the Video controller sharing the same memory.
> Needless to say as resolution an colour depth increased system performance
> goes out the window ( figuratively speaking :-) )
You mean with no VRAM? That is a bit daft for PCs when you can get dirt
cheap graphics cards. Unfortunately Acorn didn't have that option when
cost-reducing the A7000, but its capabilities are adequate for schools.
> Well you may have to get used to it. I hear a lot of noises from companies
> that are going to skip the transition from win 3.x to '95 and go direct to
> NT 4.0.
Isn't that because you can't easily upgrade from Win 95 to NT? Something
to do with the former's long filenames being a hack.
> Well given that assertion would you not agree that the future for
> a platform like the RPC is rather bleak.
It was looking pretty bleak until the likes of Oracle got interested.
Acorn's attitude has completely changed and they should be able to
exploit their technology outside the dwindling education market now. The
situation is made to look worse by the increased popularity of PCs
rather than decreased popularity of Acorns.
Greg Hennessy
In article <362e5...@tonyh.tcp.co.uk>,
Tony Houghton <to...@tcp.co.uk> writes:
>> Hmmm.. I don't know, NT 4.0 is pretty slick :-). You might even
>> be mildly impressed :-)
>
>Is that the new version whose interface is more like Windows 95? If it
>is, then it must be quite nice.
>
Yup, thats the one. It's quite impressive.
>> Well you should see the cost of a site license for something like MS Office,
>> It's a lot less than you think per place setting. The same with items like
>> Netscape Navigator.
>
>What's that got to do with their RAM requirements?
>
Well in most commercial environments you will find that Hardware is leased
due to tax reasons therefore the cost analysis of putting decent spec'd
hardware on desks to run this software is quite different when compared to
purchasing a system outright. As regards the software you then run,
regardless of RAM requirements if it's not a 'brand' name with all that
implies like support contracts, SLA's etc then the bean counters are not
going to authorise its purchase.
>> But you being the application developer :-) would agree that applications
>> should not have to be specially engineered to use something that should
>> be there as standard.
>
>I don't have to specifically engineer my applications for VM. All I need
>is a good memory management library using Dynamic Areas while being
>backwards compatible with older systems. I've just been writing one. You
>can even patch the Standard C Library to use Dynamic Areas.
>
Ahh but you have had to specifically alter/create code to make use of this,
Over the years ( Christ I feel old :-) ) I have knocked up a fair bit
of code an systems like VMS, Unix of varying sorts, NT, & OS2 and I
haven't had to write a memory management library yet :-)
>> IMHO it's a question of perception, The 'overpowering majority of people'
>> generally do not do 'demanding graphics jobs'. It's usually the more
>> mundane stuff like Word, XL etc.
>
>They don't need a powerful graphics accelerator either.
Well you will find that stock systems from vendors like Gateway, HP, Compaq
and Dell are shipping as standard with products like the Millenium and the
#9 Motion FX 771. Kinda up's the ante for non pc systems trying to compete.
>
>
>You mean with no VRAM? That is a bit daft for PCs when you can get dirt
>cheap graphics cards. Unfortunately Acorn didn't have that option when
>cost-reducing the A7000, but its capabilities are adequate for schools.
>
Yup, thats the story, Hence Microsoft reluctance, But anyone with half
a brain are leaving systems based on this architecture on the shelf and
going for the usual PCI based graphics accelerator.
>
>Isn't that because you can't easily upgrade from Win 95 to NT? Something
>to do with the former's long filenames being a hack.
>
IIRC the long filenames are not the problem, The hassle is with the
'95 registry. It's completly incompatible with the NT registry hence
there is no means of migrating the settings for any software installed
under '95 to NT. A big problem if you have a couple of thousand
MS-Office users out there.
>
>It was looking pretty bleak until the likes of Oracle got interested.
>Acorn's attitude has completely changed and they should be able to
>exploit their technology outside the dwindling education market now. The
>situation is made to look worse by the increased popularity of PCs
>rather than decreased popularity of Acorns.
>
Hmm... I don't know. It looks to me that the only winners here are
likely to be those have speculated in Acorn shares over the past 12
months.
Tony Houghton
In article <Dt8I6...@systems.DHL.COM>
ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com (Greg Hennessy) wrote:
> Yup, thats the story, Hence Microsoft reluctance, But anyone with half
> a brain are leaving systems based on this architecture on the shelf and
> going for the usual PCI based graphics accelerator.
The only reason separate graphics accelerators are cost effective for
bottom-end PCs is because of the economies of huge scale. Separate
graphics cards were made necessary because of deficiencies in early PCs'
hardware. I agree that VRAM is essential in this day and age, but it
would make sense to ship low-end PCs with a system similar to the Risc
PC's. It would be cheaper, and you'd still have the option of upgrading.
It would be possible to add a graphics accelerator to a Risc PC, but
because its native capabilities aren't entirely hopeless there isn't the
demand.
> Hmm... I don't know. It looks to me that the only winners here are
> likely to be those have speculated in Acorn shares over the past 12
> months.
All that seems to matter in the software market is size of company.
Seeing as Oracle are second only to Microsoft they should do OK for us.
Clifton College
"Alex T. Smith" <A.T....@ncl.ac.uk> wrote:
>There's no reason why not. AFAIK a 65536 (2^16) colour mode is like a
>RiscPC 32768 colour mode except that the extra bit is actually added on
>to one of the colour components. So it might be 6 bits red, 5 for green
>and 5 for blue. A possible complaint is that producing a grey scale isn't
>so straight forward.
But look at the 8-bit modes on Archimedes machines. Two bits red, two
bits green, two bits blue and four levels of "tint" - a small amount
added to each of the three.
So you get 8 bit colour with 16 greys. There's no reason why the 16th
bit couldn't be used similarly to lighten or darken colours.
AFAIK this was also used by the Spectrum! Each colour was four bits,
including the option to make it "bright". So it's a pretty old idea.
Ed Avis
Tony Houghton
In article <19960616....@infopark.demon.co.uk>
ho...@infopark.demon.co.uk (Phillip Temple) wrote:
> Talking about screen modes, what would be ideal for piping through to
> a TV set? Say you wanted to put a hi-res slideshow on.
768x576 interlaced I think. That's double Mode 35's "overscan" mode, so
you'd have to bring it down a bit to see the edges, but I saw that
resolution or close to it mentioned on one of Acorn NC's pages or
somewhere like that.
Ian Griffiths
Iain Anderson wrote:
>
> Ian Griffiths (igri...@dev.madge.com) wrote:
>
> : I don't have any appropriate price lists to hand. Can you
> : tell me how much a PPC-based PC costs? I was guessing at
> : sub-2000
>
>
> RS/6000 43P
>
> PowerPC 604 at 133MHz
> 128MB DRAM
> 2MB VRAM
> 20" monitor
> Ethernet
> SCSI-2, with internally CD-ROM and 2 of 2GB hard drives
And that's a personal computer is it? :-)
I can't wait to see the server spec.
> AIX (blech), Solaris and Windows NT.
>
> Lease at 2k UKP a year or buy for about 15k UKP.
Going on this group's general philosophy that anything not made
by Acorn will require junking after 6 months anyway, the lease
terms look like a bargain...
--
Ian Griffiths
Ian Griffiths
> RiscPC.
>
> Oh, so you are going to buy one? Sorry, I thought you were
> rubbishing them.
I'm not the anti-Acorn fanatic I'm often taken for. I just tend
to rubbish certain (IMO) spurious pro-Acorn arguments. Doesn't
mean that I don't actually like the machines, I'm just more
eclectic than most when it comes to computers. I feel that the
circulation of falacious pro-Acorn bumf does more harm than
good.
> > Speed comparisons? OK, well I'll specify a 4MB 64 bit PC
> > graphics system which narrows it down, and claim that simple
> > graphics operations (your basic primitives) will be faster.
> > This is a narrower claim, but I think it's indisputable.
>
> Wouldn't simple primitives be the sort of things that would
> fit nicely in the StrongARM's caches?
Yes, but they are also the sort of things that fit nicely into
an ARM710 cache. I had been assuming that RiscOS's legendary
efficiency at this sort of thing would mean that the
instructions per memory access were sufficiently low that once
in the cache, on an ARM710 (and even an ARM610) the processor
would be more or less fully utilising the bus to fill screen
memory. I had horizontal line fill code that managed fairly
impressive bus utilization on an ARM2 - the memory write to
instruction fetch ratio was greater than 1 for the inner loop
(the wonders of the STM instruction!), so on anything with an
instruction cache, (i.e. ARM3 or better) it's going to be
spending the majority of its time writing to memory.
Anything that fits in an ARM710 cache and never misses a bus
cycle will run no faster on a StrongARM. On the other hand,
anything difficult enough that it spends some of its time
thinking on an ARM710, letting those precious bus cycles go to
waste will go faster on a StrongARM.
I had assumed that most of the VDU drawing primitives were in
the former category.
> Perhaps you mean large blits and things, in which case I'd
> agree with you. But if you meant line drawing primitives
> I'd disagree.
I think that generic line drawing will tend to be
bus-inefficient; for anything other than 32bpp modes, this
quite often involves a read-modify-write cycle. It's not
computationally expensive however, so I wouldn't expect this to
be much faster on a StrongARM than an ARM710.
> > It's entirely possible that I've been overestimating the
> > efficiency of RiscOS's display code,
>
> The fact that it has to cope with things like
> mode-independence and rectangles that don't have their
> boundaries word-aligned would add a bit to the amount of code
> having to be executed.
One way to cope with mode independence is to have a different
set of routines for each screen mode...
Non-aligned start and end points are actually not as hard to
deal with as you might think. It requires you to perform some
entertaining mental gymnastics, resulting in two creative
applications of the barrel shifter, IIRC. The result is less
code than looks like it should work.
> An alternative theory is that even with the bottleneck, things
> that rely on the bandwidth and not on CPU speed can already be
> done in the blink of an eye anyway, so having a bottleneck
> doesn't really matter.
This too is entirely possible. IIRC Impression, when redrawing,
spends around 95% of its time in the OS, most of that presumably
being in the font manager. It may be that the font manager
takes interesting diversions before putting stuff on the screen,
(it certainly gets it right considerably more often than
Windows) and it's these that are being sped up by the StrongARM.
It would be interesting to know what the breakdown is inside the
font manager. Perhaps previously it spent virtually no time
writing to the screen and most of it's time messing around
working out what to do. The time spent writing to the screen is
constant because it's bus limited, while the algorithmic content
is getting faster with faster processors. How near are we to
the point where the bus limited portion is starting to be a more
significant portion of the whole?
--
Ian Griffiths
Nick Craig-Wood
Phillip Temple (ho...@infopark.demon.co.uk) wrote:
> In message <internews...@argonet.co.uk> Richard Travers wrote:
>
> > Hey, have I missed something here? My RPC will run in 32K colours and
> > 16M colours, but I'm damned if I can get it to run in 64K colours.
>
> Oops! Slip of the calculator. I meant 32k colours of course. 64k colours
> would be a little silly.
AFAICR if you fiddle about with the VIDC registers you can get it display
64k colours. However this isn't done in the OS because you have to decide
which of Red, Green, Blue you assign 6 bits to, leaving the rest with 5!
(Green is the normal choice because the human eye is more sensitive to Green
than any other colour.)
--
|- Nick Craig-Wood ---------------------------------- n...@axis.demon.co.uk -|
|---------- Are things getting better, or are they getting worse? ----------|
Tony Houghton
In article <31C94E...@dev.madge.com>
Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
> I'm not the anti-Acorn fanatic I'm often taken for. I just tend
> to rubbish certain (IMO) spurious pro-Acorn arguments. Doesn't
> mean that I don't actually like the machines, I'm just more
> eclectic than most when it comes to computers. I feel that the
> circulation of falacious pro-Acorn bumf does more harm than
> good.
That's true, I think ill-informed pro-Acorn, anti-PC untruths do more
harm than good. But so does coming down on them too hard. It's best just
to point out the errors rather than add every other disadvantage of
Acorns that you can think of.
> I think that generic line drawing will tend to be
> bus-inefficient; for anything other than 32bpp modes, this
> quite often involves a read-modify-write cycle. It's not
> computationally expensive however, so I wouldn't expect this to
> be much faster on a StrongARM than an ARM710.
Don't forget STRB/LDRB, that eliminates the need to read in 8bpp modes,
and it's probably easier to use two of those in 16bpp modes than a 32bit
read-modify-write.
> > The fact that it has to cope with things like
> > mode-independence and rectangles that don't have their
> > boundaries word-aligned would add a bit to the amount of code
> > having to be executed.
>
> One way to cope with mode independence is to have a different
> set of routines for each screen mode...
>
> Non-aligned start and end points are actually not as hard to
> deal with as you might think. It requires you to perform some
> entertaining mental gymnastics, resulting in two creative
> applications of the barrel shifter, IIRC. The result is less
> code than looks like it should work.
I did say 'a bit'. I know you can do all sorts of tricks, but you can't
have too much special case code without its total size getting
ridiculous.
> It would be interesting to know what the breakdown is inside the
> font manager. Perhaps previously it spent virtually no time
> writing to the screen and most of it's time messing around
> working out what to do. The time spent writing to the screen is
> constant because it's bus limited, while the algorithmic content
> is getting faster with faster processors. How near are we to
> the point where the bus limited portion is starting to be a more
> significant portion of the whole?
Once a font has been rendered once, its bitmap is in the font cache and
can be blitted straight to the screen, assuming the cache is big enough.
I should think more of the font manager's time is spent blitting than
calculating overall, but the StrongARM will make an enormous speed
increase when rendering a new font for the first time.
Mark Gillman
> Once a font has been rendered once, its bitmap is in the font cache and
> can be blitted straight to the screen, assuming the cache is big enough.
> I should think more of the font manager's time is spent blitting than
> calculating overall, but the StrongARM will make an enormous speed
> increase when rendering a new font for the first time.
Tell me if I'm being thick, but given the extra speed of StrongARM could
it be possible to do away with the cache and plot straight to the screen?
The advantage of this being that you could antialias over background
graphics (eg Web page) without having to assume a defined background colour.
You could I suppose retain the cache, but rather than storing greyscale
antialiasing data, you retain transparency data, and the screen is read from
to determine the pixel colour at the relevant point before plotting the pixel
back.
I think I've just spotted the problem - would this make the routine more
memory-speed bound, and kill the speed of the processor?
--
MG, at 6'6" not what you'd call a midget
Phillip Temple
In message <31C553...@dev.madge.com> Ian Griffiths wrote:
> I can buy a Pentium Pro machine now. I will have to wait until
> the end of the summer to get my 4-5x faster RiscPC. If I buy a
> StrongARM RiscPC, what can I do THEN to make it 4-5x faster?
It's only the first attempt at the StrongARM, and it doesn't yet
have anything fancy in there like branch prediction, etc. It has
a long life ahead of it. The P6 has every gizmo they could chuck
at it, and still isn't much faster than the Pentium. It's on its
way out, methinks.
--
Phillip Temple
Paul Irvine
Nick Craig-Wood wrote:
>
> AFAICR if you fiddle about with the VIDC registers you can get it display
> 64k colours. However this isn't done in the OS because you have to decide
> which of Red, Green, Blue you assign 6 bits to, leaving the rest with 5!
> (Green is the normal choice because the human eye is more sensitive to Green
> than any other colour.)
>
Hmm, that would be interesting. I can imagine it would be useful to graphics software,
displaying JPEGs in 64K instead of 32K colours would be nice. Do you, or doess anbody
else, have any specifics on how this could be achieved.
And wouldn't it be nice if Acorn provided support for this in the next RiscOS??
-- Paul Irvine.
Ian Griffiths
Mark Gillman wrote:
>
> Tony Houghton <to...@tcp.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > Once a font has been rendered once, its bitmap is in the
> > font cache and can be blitted straight to the screen,
> > assuming the cache is big enough. I should think more of the
> > font manager's time is spent blitting than calculating
> > overall,
I'm not so sure - I was wondering about how long it spent doing
things like working out whether the font it wants is in the
cache (probably not too bad - I assume font handles give it a
fairly good clue) and, more importantly, how hard it has to
think about metrics and positioning - this will involve a
certain amount of trundling through data structures and
calculation. It is possible that more time is spent doing this
than actually blitting.
> Tell me if I'm being thick, but given the extra speed of
> StrongARM could it be possible to do away with the cache and
> plot straight to the screen?
Not a good idea - it must take a lot longer to do this. Apart
from anything else, it has to read out the entire definition for
each letter every time round, which is bound to slow it down.
> The advantage of this being that you could antialias over
> background graphics (eg Web page) without having to assume a
> defined background colour.
Only true if the draw module could do this, which it can't.
In fact there should be no problem with doing this anyway - the
font cache doesn't really need to hold stuff in particular
colours - it should really just render everything as grayscales
and then treat that as an alpha channel as you went on to
suggest - black becomes opaque and shades of grey become the
proportion on the actual colour to mix with the colour already
on screen. This would slow the plotting down however, since it
would involve read-modify-write screen access rather than simple
writes, potentially halving the speed of the blit stage.
> I think I've just spotted the problem - would this make the
> routine more memory-speed bound, and kill the speed of the
> processor?
Perhaps. However nobody seems to know what proportion of its
time the font manager spends doing the various things it has to
do to get a cached font onto the screen, so it's not clear how
fast it would really be.
--
Ian Griffiths
Stuart Halliday
Mark Gillman (mgil...@argonet.co.uk) wrote the following...
> > Once a font has been rendered once, its bitmap is in the font cache and
> > can be blitted straight to the screen, assuming the cache is big enough.
> > I should think more of the font manager's time is spent blitting than
> > calculating overall, but the StrongARM will make an enormous speed
> > increase when rendering a new font for the first time.
>
> Tell me if I'm being thick, but given the extra speed of StrongARM could
> it be possible to do away with the cache and plot straight to the screen?
> The advantage of this being that you could antialias over background
> graphics (eg Web page) without having to assume a defined background colour.
The main problem is probably the time it would take to get the font data off
the disc drive?
--
Stuart Halliday - Web Master of the
___ ___ _ __ ___ _ _
/ _ \ __ ___ _ _ _ _ / __| _| |__ ___ _ \ \ / (_) | |__ _ __ _ ___
| _ / _/ _ \ '_| ' \ | (_| || | '_ \/ -_) '_\ V /| | | / _` / _` / -_)
|_| |_\__\___/_| |_||_| \___\_, |_.__/\___|_| \_/ |_|_|_\__,_\__, \___|
|__/ |___/
http://www.cybervillage.co.uk/acorn/
ftp://quantum:qua...@ftp.cybervillage.co.uk/pub
John Martin
Tony Houghton <to...@tcp.co.uk> wrote:
> Once a font has been rendered once, its bitmap is in the font cache and
> can be blitted straight to the screen, assuming the cache is big enough.
Just as a curiousity ...
I have my Font Cache set to 1020kB, which seems to be the upper limit
available via the configure app on my RPC. Probably don't need it that
high, but it does make it faster when I'm trying out various fonts for
posters.
John
--
Mark Gillman
> > Tell me if I'm being thick, but given the extra speed of StrongARM could
> > it be possible to do away with the cache and plot straight to the screen?
> > The advantage of this being that you could antialias over background
> > graphics (eg Web page) without having to assume a defined background colour.
>
> The main problem is probably the time it would take to get the font data off
> the disc drive?
So why can't the font manager hold the stroke information (if that's the
right term) for a font rather than a bitmap? A bit like the advantages of
a vector graphic over a bitmap.
When I said do away with the cache, I meant of pre-calculated data, not
the whole info.
Marc Meier
In message <31C553...@dev.madge.com> Ian Griffiths wrote:
> I can buy a Pentium Pro machine now. I will have to wait until
> the end of the summer to get my 4-5x faster RiscPC. If I buy a
> StrongARM RiscPC, what can I do THEN to make it 4-5x faster?
And you really believe that on a Pentium Pro, software will run faster than
RiscOS apps on an SA? What can you do to make the Pentium Pro machine 4-5x
times faster?
Nothing! But you may can change you RiscPC Board in the end of 97.
The Pentium Pro is only a hardware emulator for the the x86 architecture.
Of course, any native chip architecture is faster than an emulator. The
PPC, ARM,Mips... , any modern processor beats Intel chips in performance
and price.
Marc
IA. Nichols
Mark Gillman (mgil...@argonet.co.uk) wrote:
: So why can't the font manager hold the stroke information (if that's the
: right term) for a font rather than a bitmap? A bit like the advantages of
: a vector graphic over a bitmap.
If you mean the font outlines, then the font manager already does this.
Try issuing a *fontlist command from a task window or command line - it
will list both stored outlines & bitmaps.
--
________________________________________________________________________
* | An 8086 PC is a piece of s*** |
| / | |/-\ | A Pentium PC will slide off the shovel faster |
| | | | | | |
| \-/| | / | i.a.n...@bris.ac.uk |
| * http://emrs.chm.bris.ac.uk/ARUG/ |
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ian Griffiths
Marc Meier wrote:
>
> Ian Griffiths wrote:
>
> > I can buy a Pentium Pro machine now. I will have to wait
> > until the end of the summer to get my 4-5x faster RiscPC.
> > If I buy a StrongARM RiscPC, what can I do THEN to make it
> > 4-5x faster?
>
> And you really believe that on a Pentium Pro, software will
> run faster than RiscOS apps on an SA?
Possibly. Word 7 runs faster on my Pentium machine than
Impression does on my turbo A5000. Quite a lot faster. I've
not tried Impression on a StrongARM nor have I tried Word on a
Pentium Pro so I can't judge. Rayshade's certainly damn
impressive. (Particularly when you run two at once. :-)
Doesn't slow down at all.) And I do have an FPA in the A5000
BTW.
> What can you do to make the Pentium Pro machine 4-5x times
> faster?
>
> Nothing! But you may can change you RiscPC Board in the end of
> 97.
By which time I would expect PCs to have got 2-3 times faster.
(Don't tell me that the Pentium Pro has gone as far as it can.
I heard all that before last time round with the Pentium.
They're always behind the hype, but they always get faster.)
I don't expect to see any more 4-5x speed increases in the near
future with the ARM. I think the StrongARM is a one off. We
will now probably be progressing at about the same speed as the
rest of the industry.
> The Pentium Pro is only a hardware emulator for the the x86
> architecture.
Sounds like something someone else heard somewhere that got
paraphrased twice on its way here. What do you actually mean by
that? It's more or less meaningless, in that it's true of any
processor implementation.
> Of course, any native chip architecture is faster than an
> emulator.
So presumably you mean that the processor translates 80x86 code
into some other form of code and executes that.
Your statement is clearly untrue by the way - I think you'll
find that a Pentium Pro is quite a lot faster than an 8086.
What is true is that it's easier, using current technologies to
make a RISC architecture go fast than it is to make a CISC
architecture go fast, because our current best tecniques are all
based around RISC, and the best approach to building fast CISC
these days turns out to be hybrid RISC/translation/CISC design,
which is bound to be less efficient. All things being equal
this would lead to implementations of RISC architectures going
faster than CISC architectures.
All things are not equal. If the resources that have gone into
Intels x86 chips went into a through and through RISC chip you'd
have something faster than a Pentium Pro. Indeed there are some
chips which are faster, but not many and for most if not all the
margins are small.
> The PPC, ARM,Mips... , any modern processor beats Intel chips
> in performance and price.
Well, price anyway. Intel have in general been pretty good at
keeping up with the rest. They are typically behind, but never
very far behind.
--
Ian Griffiths
Clifton College
Tony Houghton <to...@tcp.co.uk> wrote:
>IG> It would be interesting to know what the breakdown is inside the
>IG> font manager. Perhaps previously it spent virtually no time
>IG> writing to the screen and most of it's time messing around
>IG> working out what to do. The time spent writing to the screen is
>IG> constant because it's bus limited, while the algorithmic content
>IG> is getting faster with faster processors. How near are we to
>IG> the point where the bus limited portion is starting to be a more
>IG> significant portion of the whole?
>Once a font has been rendered once, its bitmap is in the font cache and
>can be blitted straight to the screen, assuming the cache is big enough.
>I should think more of the font manager's time is spent blitting than
>calculating overall, but the StrongARM will make an enormous speed
>increase when rendering a new font for the first time.
That just reminded me of Acorn User's review of the A540 in 1990. "It
takes less than a second to rasterize a new font chunk, compared with
the three seconds the 400 series can take." That was in the days when
whole "chunks" of characters were computed at once, rather than the
letter-by-letter approach of RISC OS 3.
I don't really see how the StrongARM can make an enormous speed
increase when rendering a new font for the first time. Even with a
complex font in a fairly large size, the time taken to rasterize is
barely perceptible, even on my A440/1.
Ed Avis
Ian Lynch
Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
> Possibly. Word 7 runs faster on my Pentium machine than Impression
> does on my turbo A5000. Quite a lot faster.
I bet its faster then Interword on A BBC B too ;-)
--
Ian
Ian Lynch
Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
> Well, price anyway. Intel have in general been pretty good at keeping
> up with the rest. They are typically behind, but never very far behind.
Hot on their heels you might say :-)
--
Ian
Ted Lepley
Ian Lynch wrote:
IIRC Interword was a lot faster than my typing even then so I don't know
that I would benefit from a Pentium (nor would most people doing simple
wordprocessing).
Ted.
--
--. --. --. --. : : --- --- ted...@argonet.co.uk
|_| |_| | _ | | | | |_ | East London. UK
| | |Using Fleece Server | Clan Member
| | | \ |_|and V.107|__ | ZFC S+
John Surcombe
In article <19960620....@axis.demon.co.uk>
n...@axis.demon.co.uk (Nick Craig-Wood) wrote:
>AFAICR if you fiddle about with the VIDC registers you can get it display
>64k colours. However this isn't done in the OS because you have to decide
>which of Red, Green, Blue you assign 6 bits to, leaving the rest with 5!
You could do something like the 256-colour modes on old machines and
use the last bit as a sort of 'tint' value, adding &04 to all three
components when it is set.
--
Cheers now, John <http://www.guernsey.net/~surcombe/>
Tip of the month: *RMFaster FPEmulator makes POVRay go 20% faster
Richard Travers
Ian Griffiths (igri...@dev.madge.com) wrote...
> Possibly. Word 7 runs faster on my Pentium machine than
> Impression does on my turbo A5000. Quite a lot faster.
That sounds good when you say it fast, but what exactly does it mean?
In what respects does it "run faster"?
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Richard Travers |*ZFC*| 01736 | Obfuscation |
| ri...@argonet.co.uk |**B**| 757941 | to order |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alex Singleton
Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
> Possibly. Word 7 runs faster on my Pentium machine than Impression
> does on my turbo A5000. Quite a lot faster.
Do you mean screen redraw or speed to open up a dialogue box? How do
the machines compare in a "real-life" situation - e.g. how long does
it take to produce the same poster from start to having a printed
solution?
Alex.
John Surcombe
>Tony Houghton <to...@tcp.co.uk> wrote:
>>Once a font has been rendered once, its bitmap is in the font cache and
>>can be blitted straight to the screen, assuming the cache is big enough.
>>I should think more of the font manager's time is spent blitting than
>>calculating overall, but the StrongARM will make an enormous speed
>>increase when rendering a new font for the first time.
I don't think this is true. Plotting a font takes a long time
compared to blitting sprites. For a start there is a mask to take
care of, which means you can't just splat the data over whole words -
most pixels will not occupy whole words. Then the anti-aliasing has
to be adjusted for the current anti-aliasing palette, and the text has
to be clipped to the graphics rectangle. These operations have to be
done for every pixel (except clipping...). Then for every character
the correct part of the font cache has to be located, and the exact
part of screen memory has to be found to write to - this is a fairly
complex operation involving all manner of millipoints, pixels, OS
units and kerning pairs (all will benefit greatly from the DSP
multiply unit). Then throw in the fact that the most common font
characters will easily fit in the StrongARM data cache (*fontlist
tells me that Homerton.Medium 12pt, my desktop font, currently
occupies 7kb) and the actual amount of data output from the font
manager is /slightly/ smaller than the 64MB/s the bus allows. Put all
this together and you have a recipe for something which will probably
benefit from a StrongARM more than any other operation.
Ian Griffiths
> > does on my turbo A5000. Quite a lot faster.
>
> Do you mean screen redraw or speed to open up a dialogue box?
Mostly screen redraw. Not much to tell between them on most
dialogue boxes.
> How do the machines compare in a "real-life" situation - e.g.
> how long does it take to produce the same poster from start to
> having a printed solution?
Well if we're producing posters, then I'd probably be using
CorelXARA! Or Artworks. If there's anything at all complex by
way of pictures then CX is much quicker to use because I don't
have to sit around waiting for redraws for anything like as
long. Otherwise it's a bit faster, but not by an order of
magnitude or anything.
The main problem with comparing my use of Word and Impression is
that I know Impression rather well (I even wrote bits of it),
and I've not used Word in anger very often.
--
Ian Griffiths
Greg Hennessy
Nigel Parker <nc...@cam.ac.uk> writes:
>Except of course on cost. You can purchase an adequate RPC and fill it
>with software for 2000ukp. A middle PC is 100MHz Pentium "multi-media"
>box which, with software would cost well over 2500ukp. Both machines
>will perform identically for most use. The only real benefit for the PC
>is if you want to do something out of the ordinary - some obscure feature
>which Word7 boasts, but Publisher (or equiv.) doesn't.
>
Huh ? 2 and half grand for a p100 with software, Have you been buying
packard bells down PC World again ? :-), A p100 with 32mb, 1gb of disk
and a multimedia kit is ~1200 notes at the moment. Another 100 puts office
on it. Another 200 with have an Inkjet printer beside it, Still a lot
less than an 'Adequate' RPC.
>I dont call a 700% increase in performance (I have a ARM610) for 250ukp a
>waste. Rather, it is an awesome opportunity to make my machine fly for
>an incredible price.
Well that will have to be seen to be believed. It still does not have
hardware FP as standard. And IMHO it will be found that the SA will
break quite a lot of software, more expense.
> I think
>the new SA110 (even on an old motherboard) will give the impression of a
>top of the range P, PPro, or PowerPC.
>
ROFL :-). Try using a P Pro 200 with NT and then come back to me with
that statement.
>
>That really does depend on what your office work is. If you were doing
>an enormous spreadsheet than maybe you're right. If you're doing any
>application which is not processor hungry (ie most) then people choose to
>use the environment (or OS) in which they are most productive. For a
>large number of people this is RiscOS.
>
99% of computer users have to work in the real world, Hence the OS is
irrelevant to the job they have to do, The applications on the other hand is
a different story. A SA is little relevance if there is no software to
run on it.
greg
--
--
Greg Hennessy
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ZZ Top, They Really Can't Be Beat |ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com
Webmasters do it with <HTML> |cmk...@cix.compulink.co.uk
Nunzz!! Aaargh !!! |gr...@cmkrnl.demon.co.uk
Ted Lepley
I haven't used Word 7, but does it still slow down after about 3-4 hours of use
like Word 6 does?
A poor young student who uses Word 6 for his college work *normally* reckons to
re-install Word 6 on his 486 100MHz PC every month or so as it gets too slow to
keep up with his typing (and he can't type).
Nick Furness
> =
> In article <31D177...@uk.gdscorp.com>
> Nick Furness <ni...@uk.gdscorp.com> wrote:
> =
> > So how will a StrongARM 200 fare? On the existing
> > architecture it's basically shagged, or rather wasted.
> =
> I've never seen you post here before so I can only assume you haven't
> been reading and are just going by the speculation that was about befor=
e
> Acorn got hold of a StrongARM to test in a Risc PC. Basically its
> pre-production performance is even better than projected performance fo=
r
> a version with L2 cache.
For a minute I thought I wasn't welcome here. Hmpf. Well,
that point is =
interesting - but do you have any more information than that?
For example, were Acorn's projected performace figures
pessimistic in any way? I'm quite prepared to be proved
wrong, but I find it hard to believe that last comment.
By the way, you're right that I haven't been reading, but I
would say that my comments are based on (at least slightly)
more than mere speculation.
> ARM have a history of squeezing the most out of limited bandwidth
> memory. Intel and PowerPC don't, they rely on fast buses much more than=
> ARM.
I think that I half follow what you're trying to say, and I
can neither agree nor disagree with you without pondering for
a while, though at first glance your theory would seem to be
highly improbable. However, it's more than just architecture
that differentiates Intel from ARM so, as I said, I'll mull it
over a little.
Nick
-- =
--------------------------------------------------------------------
The opinions expressed above are my=A6 own and not those of the
company
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Nick Furness [ni...@uk.gdscorp.com]
GDS UK Ltd. [ni...@argonet.co.uk]
Cambridge
England
Paul Vigay
> > Now reconsider the statement, that I will back up also, that Word 7 runs
> > (or rather feels) faster on a Pentium than Impression on a Turbo A5000.
>
> Well the one I used felt a lot slower than my RPC so depends on what
> you are doing.
Rubbish! Word 7 on a 100MHz Pentium runs slower than Impression on a
RISC PC. That's running the two machines side by side, and with 24Mb in
the PC. Of course, RPC's don't have to worry about lack of RAM macking the
machine slow down.
> > I still have to say that a Pentium or even a 486 based machine would
> > trample on an ARM based machine penny for penny.
>
> Go trample on your own machine. For the things I do RPC is excellent
> value for money and I am not very tempted to by a Pentium having used
> them on occasions.
Again, rubbish. I can run a Pentium by the side of my RPC and the RPC will
beat the Pentium hands down on everything I try - except crashing - The PC
comes
into it's own league in terms of crashing. Win 95 crashes on average ever two
minutes.
> > I find the ARM interesting and great to use, but for serious office
> > work, I would choose a Pentium NT/95 machine.
>
> So great to use you wouldn't use it in your office. Bit of a paradox
> really. I use mine in my office because it is great to use.
A RISC PC is certainly more productive in our offices than Pentium machines.
_
|_|
| aul, using !NetMail v1.28 on an Acorn RISC PC
Paranormal www homepage: http://rainbow.medberry.com/enigma/index.html
Nick Furness
>
> Well I was typing a simple 2 page text only document in Word 7, Win 95
> on a P100 and did nothing of particular significance when the whole
> lot crashed and would not even respond to CTRL Alt DEL. At least my
> crashes in Publisher tend to be when I do something rather unusual and
> complex. Certainly blew my socks off ;-)
Hmm. I have to say that Win3.1 crashes too often for anyone with blood
pressure problems. Win95 is better, but you still have to tread mildly
carefully. Win NT is really rather good, all things considered
(Microsoft, Architecture, Other software etc. etc. etc.).
It seems to be that a PC has to be set up very carefully, but if that's
done then it runs perfectly well. Setting up carefully does not mean
getting the dealer to do it and install everything,it just means
avoiding having little things left right and center that are not
necessary or that are of dubious quality (like shareware DLLs and stuff
like that - I'm not explaining this very well, I fear).
> BTW is there a way of getting anti-aliased text on this set up cos the
> screen looks crap. I would have thought such a rich and advanced
I never said that they were advanced. And as far as I know, yes there
is a way - and it was the default on the last Pentium notebook I used
from HP with Win 95 (though it was out of date), but you had to have
enough colours on screen.
> company would have made it the default - or was it just the set up
> on the machine I was using? Oh, and the work area is a bit cluttered
> with all the window nutton bars etc. How do I switch them off? And why
Eh? Most button bars I've come across can be moved, removed, configured
etc. etc.
> does it take such a time to pull up dialogue boxes - probably 8Mb is a
> bit tight on memory for a 2 page text document ;-). Since you don't
As it happens, yes. Sad but true - see below.
> have very demanding needs why do you need Word 7?
What I meant was I don't do DTP. As in Pictures and frames and stuff.
OK. Here am I: Own a RiscPC 610 Two Slice 26Mb RAM machine with CDROM
(disconnected because I have 3 IDE devices and IDE cards are so
expensive I'm not buying another right now) and 17" monitor. And a
CBM64, sadly never used. Right, now I work on HP Unix, Solaris, VMS,
AXP Blah blah blah, and do any kind of non-coding/internet work on PCs.
The PCs we have are 8Mb 486DX33 jobs and Pentium 130s with 24Mb RAM.
I'll admit that the PC software (least of all Windows) has got so fat
and swap-space hungry that it pure and simple sucks on our 486 Machines.
In Australia I used 486DX2 66 machines with 16Mb RAM and they worked
just fine. Although usable, I'd have said that Impression on my RiscPC
was faster (but then I'd have said that about Impression on my old A440
ARM3 machine)
However, in documenting code and the like, I found Word6 much easier to
use than Impression. What I really look for in software is the ability
to do anything (within reason, if there are pedants out there) and that
means making it extendible so that if the software house doesn't think
of something that you'll need then you can implement it.
That's what really made Word stand out over Impression, and all I wanted
to say was that on a decent PC that would make me choose Word over
Impression, or Excel over Eureka. There are other reasons for choosing
Xara over Artworks. And Netscape over anything, and where's a decent
Web Page creator for ARM, and where's Duke Nukem 3D?
> Well the one I used felt a lot slower than my RPC so depends on what
> you are doing.
Yup, I guess it depends on what you're doing, but I have to say that it
seems to me that you used a chod Pentium.
> > I find the ARM interesting and great to use, but for serious office
> > work, I would choose a Pentium NT/95 machine.
>
> So great to use you wouldn't use it in your office. Bit of a paradox
> really. I use mine in my office because it is great to use.
Ok dude, badly explained. With my ARM and WP and Spreadsheets I would
not feel that if there was something that I had to do that I could get
it done, whatever. With a Pentium and MS Office, that is not the case.
If something's not on a menu-bar or in a command list, you can write it.
But I prefer the ARM architecture and I prefer coding the ARM (more
challenging, more opportunities, smaller market - damn!).
>
> Isn't life just a mystery, man!
Oh yes.
Nick.
[All the usual company disclaimer stuff - everything I said is mine,
though I
guess the company has intellectual rights to it]
Toby Haynes
Greg Hennessy <ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com> wrote:
>In article <Pine.HPP.3.91.960626...@club.eng.cam.ac.uk>,
>Nigel Parker <nc...@cam.ac.uk> writes:
>>I dont call a 700% increase in performance (I have a ARM610) for 250ukp a
>>waste. Rather, it is an awesome opportunity to make my machine fly for
>>an incredible price.
>Well that will have to be seen to be believed.
Believe it. I've seen it. It shifts - easily better than 4-5 times
faster than a 710@40MHz on standard desktop tasks.
>It still does not have hardware FP as standard.
Which is a problem - but not for most people who currently use the
machines. Inlined floating point code would be useful though to bridge
the gap a little more.
>And IMHO it will be found that the SA will break quite a lot of
>software, more expense.
More expense? Well possibly you might have to pay a small fee for a
patch but I suspect that a large group of patches will come with the
new OS to tie up the loopholes in a fair amount of software. I don't
anticipate a huge fee like you incur when upgrading Quark Xpress for
example. People will probably have to get rid of dongle protected
software in some cases, but since CC are alledgedly going to sort out
their end I doubt we'll have to junk large portions of our software
libraries.
>>I think
>>the new SA110 (even on an old motherboard) will give the impression of a
>>top of the range P, PPro, or PowerPC.
>ROFL :-). Try using a P Pro 200 with NT and then come back to me with
>that statement.
Amusing. Having played on a SA Risc PC (albeit for a few minutes) at the
ARM Club show, I'd say that it feels *extremely* slick. I don't have
access to a PPro NT machine, but I do have access to an UltraSparc
running Solaris 2.5, and the comparison is extremely favourable for
the SA machine.
>>That really does depend on what your office work is. If you were doing
>>an enormous spreadsheet than maybe you're right. If you're doing any
>>application which is not processor hungry (ie most) then people choose to
>>use the environment (or OS) in which they are most productive. For a
>>large number of people this is RiscOS.
>99% of computer users have to work in the real world, Hence the OS is
>irrelevant to the job they have to do,
Hmmm. I agree that most people use only one (or maybe two)
applications for most of their work, but I totally disagree that the
OS is irrelevant to the job they have to do. The GUI for that OS
defines the way you use the software - the simplicity and speed which
you can access features is totally dependant on the way that the GUI
designed. Productivity surveys time and time again compare graphical
front ends in an attempt to decide which is best - why bother with
this if it makes no difference? And don't try and claim that the OS is
distictly separate from the GUI - nowadays that is a very blurred line
- ie MacOS.
>The applications on the other hand is a different story. A SA is
>little relevance if there is no software to run on it.
The mere fact that there is an OS which works with it says a lot about
software compatability. Since Style, Publisher, Draw, etc also worked
as of the Arm Club show in Cambridge, on a early version of the card
running a prototype OS, to claim that *no* software runs on it is
blatently rubbish.
Cheers,
Toby
--
Toby Haynes | "I COULD MURDER A CURRY" - Death
Somewhere in Cambridge | Mort by Terry Pratchett
Greg Hennessy
tj...@mrao.cam.ac.uk (Toby Haynes) writes:
>In article <DtnAt...@systems.DHL.COM>,
>Greg Hennessy <ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com> wrote:
>Believe it. I've seen it. It shifts - easily better than 4-5 times
>faster than a 710@40MHz on standard desktop tasks.
>
>
>patch but I suspect that a large group of patches will come with the
>new OS to tie up the loopholes in a fair amount of software.
Given some of the fundamental architecture changes with the SA, I
find it unlikely that simple patch will fix a lot of problems,
>
>Amusing. Having played on a SA Risc PC (albeit for a few minutes) at the
>ARM Club show, I'd say that it feels *extremely* slick. I don't have
>access to a PPro NT machine, but I do have access to an UltraSparc
>running Solaris 2.5, and the comparison is extremely favourable for
>the SA machine.
>
Lets try to keep this as an apples to apples comparison, You show me an SA
based system running Unix, Openwin with let's say Oracle 7 with Netscape's
Enterprise server and then come back to me with the above assertion.
IMHO An Ultrasparc with half an OS that stops everthing to redraw the
screen would be just as quick :-).
>Hmmm. I agree that most people use only one (or maybe two)
>applications for most of their work, but I totally disagree that the
>OS is irrelevant to the job they have to do. The GUI for that OS
>defines the way you use the software - the simplicity and speed which
>you can access features is totally dependant on the way that the GUI
>designed. Productivity surveys time and time again compare graphical
>front ends in an attempt to decide which is best - why bother with
>this if it makes no difference? And don't try and claim that the OS is
>distictly separate from the GUI - nowadays that is a very blurred line
>- ie MacOS.
>
Productivity surveys have absolutely no effect on the bean counters, The
bottom line is all that matters, The vast majority of us poor sods have to
put up with the tools we are given ( some of which are quite good others
Ughhh...) , No amount of pious nonsense about 'simplicity and speed' is
going to make it any other way.
>>The applications on the other hand is a different story. A SA is
>>little relevance if there is no software to run on it.
>
>The mere fact that there is an OS which works with it says a lot about
>software compatability. Since Style, Publisher, Draw, etc also worked
>as of the Arm Club show in Cambridge, on a early version of the card
>running a prototype OS, to claim that *no* software runs on it is
>blatently rubbish.
>
Jehosaphat :-) !, I'll just ring up my re-seller and bollock them for not
bringing my attention to the landmark software you have mentioned above.
NOT. Where is Netscape Navigator ? Lotus Notes ? Excel ? Word ? Autocad ? I
mention the above because
A> They're cross platform running on at least 3 Seperate OS's
B> Have quite literally millions of users
C> Will never run on the shipped OS from a small Cambridge Firm.
Ian Griffiths
>
> Except of course on cost. You can purchase an adequate RPC
> and fill it with software for 2000ukp. A middle PC is 100MHz
> Pentium "multi-media" box which, with software would cost well
> over 2500ukp.
Or alternatively you could buy a dual P133 system for 2000ukp.
Where the hell are you buying your PCs from?
> > So how will a StrongARM 200 fare? On the existing
> > architecture it's basically shagged, or rather wasted.
>
> I dont call a 700% increase in performance (I have a ARM610)
> for 250ukp a waste.
If all you do is things that are 700% faster, then that's fine.
But how do you know? JPEG decompression is impressively faster
(although I've not seen any comparisons with PCs doing the same
job; anyone know how they do?) but loading the JPEG and saving
the result will take almost exactly the same amount of time. Do
you know whether you are currently processor or IO bound? I
would guess that most people don't know.
--
Ian Griffiths
Ian Griffiths
>
> Well I was typing a simple 2 page text only document in Word
> 7, Win 95 on a P100 and did nothing of particular significance
> when the whole lot crashed and would not even respond to CTRL
> Alt DEL. At least my crashes in Publisher tend to be when I do
> something rather unusual and complex. Certainly blew my socks
> off ;-)
Oh you can repeat the effect on Publisher if you know how...
And just for the record I've not seen Word 7 crash, ever.
> BTW is there a way of getting anti-aliased text on this set up
> cos the screen looks crap.
Right hand mouse button on desktop, select properties, choose
the 'Plus!' tab and enable 'Font smoothing'.
Unless you're running a different OS of course.
> I would have thought such a rich and advanced company would
> have made it the default
MS's anti-aliasing is still a bit shit sadly - it only works in
high colour modes for starters. (This is to do with how they
circumvent the problem that because Win has never had
anti-aliasing, unlike RiscOS, applications aren't required to
choose both background and foreground colours for text. It just
mixes colours in situ, which is mildly complex in anything other
than high colour modes so they don't bother.) It also only
works on large text, which is just mind-bogglingly dull.
> Oh, and the work area is a bit cluttered with all the window
> nutton bars etc. How do I switch them off?
Click on their close buttons? If they are docked, you can't see
the close button, so just drag them away from the window edge
first. Alternatively, you'll find options to do this in the
program config.
Ever thought of reading the manual?
You must realise that ANY new system is a bit of a mystery to
anyone using it the first time. RiscOS is no different. People
coming from Windows try things they're used to and find they
don't work, even though the 'correct' RiscOS method is usually
not too difficult. Wouldn't you chastise such people if they
were to accuse RiscOS of being bad on such flimsy and narrow
analysis? So why are you doing the same?
--
Ian Griffiths
Ian Griffiths
> > Impression does on my turbo A5000. Quite a lot faster.
>
The problem has never been typing speed. It's more the time it
takes Impression to scroll through a document. It's not slow as
such, it's just not done in the blink of an eye either. It
makes a difference, IMO.
--
Ian Griffiths
Thomas Boroske
: Rubbish! Word 7 on a 100MHz Pentium runs slower than Impression on a
: RISC PC. That's running the two machines side by side, and with 24Mb in
: the PC. Of course, RPC's don't have to worry about lack of RAM macking the
: machine slow down.
[ SNIP ]
: Again, rubbish. I can run a Pentium by the side of my RPC and the RPC will
: beat the Pentium hands down on everything I try [ snip ]
ROTFL !!!
Are jonking or are you just not trying hard enough ???
I guess there are a number of things that run faster on a P100 than on
your RPC.
Try comparing apllications that are available on both platforms, for
example LaTeX or gcc. I grant you your RPC in single tasking LaTeX won't
even come near to the P100 running in multitasking (and smooth!).
Thomas
Thomas Boroske
: Tony Houghton wrote:
: > Acorn got hold of a StrongARM to test in a Risc PC. Basically its
: > pre-production performance is even better than projected performance fo=
: r
: > a version with L2 cache.
: For a minute I thought I wasn't welcome here. Hmpf. Well,
: that point is =
: interesting - but do you have any more information than that?
: For example, were Acorn's projected performace figures
: pessimistic in any way? I'm quite prepared to be proved
: wrong, but I find it hard to believe that last comment.
Well, he didn't make it up but it's a comment by Acorn made when they
annouced the SA upgrade. It seems that the SA isn't just a ARM710 running
at 200Mhz but has also been improved elsewhere.
I don't know wether their projected figures have been pessimistic,
I think it just appeared that it's not only the slow and narrow memory
bus that keeps the RPC from going faster, so the SA seems to give a
quite nice improvement over the ARM710.
What I mean is: Before the tests people though that typical screen redraws
couldn't be speeded up very much, for example. A screen redraw consists of
- Sprite plots : Memory intensive
- Font draws : Most of the times sprite plots -> Memory intensive
Now someone mentioned that font draws (even if coming from precalculated
characters) are quite a lot more complicated as masking, adjusting
the bitmaps to the screen depth, clipping and such has to be done.
This seems to be true for quite a lot of things, hence the SA
might show a better performance than Acorn projected for the 2nd level
cached card.
Just my thoughts ....
BTW, I'm looking forward on seeing the SA live at Saturday.
Thomas
David Allsopp
Greg Hennessy <ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com> wrote:
>Jehosaphat :-) !, I'll just ring up my re-seller and bollock them for not
>bringing my attention to the landmark software you have mentioned above.
>NOT. Where is Netscape Navigator ? Lotus Notes ? Excel ? Word ? Autocad ? I
>mention the above because
> A> They're cross platform running on at least 3 Seperate OS's
> B> Have quite literally millions of users
> C> Will never run on the shipped OS from a small Cambridge Firm.
Whilst your point is fair for Word etc, Netscape is irrelevant
because it's just a viewer - HTML is (sort of) standard, and any other browser
supporting the same standard(s) will do.
David.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion, it is by the beans of Java
that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a
warning, it is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ian Lynch
> Do you know whether you are currently processor or IO bound?
> I would guess that most people don't know.
I would guess most people don't give a monkeys ;-)
--
Ian
Ian Lynch
> MS's anti-aliasing is still a bit shit sadly
Snip
technical explanation of why
Snip
Thanks thought it might be something like that.
> Ever thought of reading the manual?
My flipant answer - Never needed to with any of my Acorn kit so why
should I start now? I got to grips with a Psion on occassional use
without reading a manual, a Z88 largely so, A310, A RPC, RO2, RO3,
RO3.5. Win 3.1 too a level better than the majority of users which is
good enough for what I need.
Didn't need a manual for anti-aliasing on an Arc - its there any way.
I have referred to a PC manual on occassions and on-line help but
mostly it tells me quickly what I don't need to know because its
obvious and not what I do need to know. I searched online help in Win
95 for anti-aliasing and it didn't find it. So I asked you - much
easier :-)
> Wouldn't you chastise such people if they were to accuse RiscOS of
> being bad on such flimsy and narrow analysis? So why are you doing
> the same?
IIRC I didn't say anything was bad, just asked some questions and
described my recent experience. Used Word 7 and Win95 -actually I
think it was Windows that crashed. Yes, Publisher has crashed on me
but not on 2 pages of plain text.
No - I only chastise people who have no experience at all and make
erroneous comments. Had one tonight who said with scorn about a
colleague, that it was *because he was an Acorn man* I asked, has this
person improved since you bought PCs? Actually, people are more key to
getting computers to work than the systems. I have actually used
Windows 3 - not 95, quite a bit and often give help to people on
Windows systems. Its just I end up in situations sometimes where I
have to do this at short notice without time to read the manual.
Seems to me if a PC goes wrong most people laugh it off as just one of
those things that you put up with with computers. If they see an Arc
go wrong its because it isn't industry standard so what do you expect?
The onus is always on the Arc to prove its better.
You and I both know that if the underlying technology had been
developed to its potential with the same sort of budgets Risc OS and
ARM would be a far better system than Wintel. The reason why it hasn't
is that marketing pressure leads far more people to
criticise/marginalise Acorn than PCs. If PCs really are better (and
this is a subjective argument which is impossible to resolve -
politics in effect) it is because of the attitudes described in the
previous paragraph. This is why a lot of people don't like your posts
(me, I luv them ;-) ). You see yourself as objective, but this is
politics not objectivity.
--
Ian
Tony Houghton
Nick Furness <ni...@uk.gdscorp.com> wrote:
> Tony Houghton wrote:
>
> > Acorn got hold of a StrongARM to test in a Risc PC. Basically its
> > pre-production performance is even better than projected performance fo=
> > r ^
^
Welcome to the wonderful world of Netscape Mozilla.
> > a version with L2 cache.
>
> interesting - but do you have any more information than that?
> For example, were Acorn's projected performace figures
> pessimistic in any way? I'm quite prepared to be proved
> wrong, but I find it hard to believe that last comment.
>
> By the way, you're right that I haven't been reading, but I
> would say that my comments are based on (at least slightly)
> more than mere speculation.
I think I read it somewhere like ART's StrongARM FAQ or perhaps in a
magazine. It definitely came from ART though. Your comments remind me of
all the pessimistic posters a month or two ago who shut up after it was
seen in action at Wakefield and backed up the optimistic figures.
--
http://www.tcp.co.uk/~tonyh/ WinEd, Bombz and more for RISC OS
Matthew Hambley
> A poor young student who uses Word 6 for his college work *normally*
> reckons to re-install Word 6 on his 486 100MHz PC every month or so as it
> gets too slow to keep up with his typing (and he can't type).
--
(\/)atthew Hambly, nutter by Royal Appointment
Uni: cee...@cee.hw.ac.uk "It doesn't matter if the cat is
Home: mham...@arcade.demon.co.uk black or white as long as it's
WWW: http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~ceemah/ been cooked in a Wok." - K.Thomas
--
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Tony Houghton
ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com (Greg Hennessy) wrote:
> Jehosaphat :-) !, I'll just ring up my re-seller and bollock them for not
> bringing my attention to the landmark software you have mentioned above.
> NOT. Where is Netscape Navigator ? Lotus Notes ? Excel ? Word ? Autocad ? I
> mention the above because
> A> They're cross platform running on at least 3 Seperate OS's
> B> Have quite literally millions of users
> C> Will never run on the shipped OS from a small Cambridge Firm.
Your favourite applications are all excellent products. But just because
RISC OS software doesn't have all the features and isn't 'industry
standard' doesn't mean its users are some sort of idiots who have to be
belittled at every oppotunity. RISC OS and its software has the
following advantages:
Easy to use.
Efficient.
Upgrades are cheap.
Upgrades don't need a more powerful machine than the previous version
just to achieve equivalent functionality, let alone use the new
features on top. [1]
Support is mostly free and there's a cosy 'community'. You can actually
contact most of the software authors.
If you don't need the extra features and total industry standard
interoperability, then there is nothing silly about Acorns.
[1] For example, RISC OS "SA" is promised to run faster on an ARM 6 or 7
than RISC OS 3.6. Compare and contrast with Windows.
Oh, to take your point C. You think that's something to be proud of?
Greg Hennessy
dna...@cus.cam.ac.uk (David Allsopp) writes:
>In article <Dtnzo...@systems.DHL.COM>,
>Whilst your point is fair for Word etc, Netscape is irrelevant
>because it's just a viewer - HTML is (sort of) standard, and any other browser
>supporting the same standard(s) will do.
>
I don't agree, Netscape is the 'de facto' standard for Browsers and
it's extensions to HTML, This comes from having ~85% of the browser market.
Any Risc-os based browser supporting Frames or plug-ins yet ?
Greg Hennessy
Tony Houghton <to...@tcp.co.uk> writes:
>In article <Dtnzo...@systems.DHL.COM>
> ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com (Greg Hennessy) wrote:
>
>> Jehosaphat :-) !, I'll just ring up my re-seller and bollock them for not
>> bringing my attention to the landmark software you have mentioned above.
>> NOT. Where is Netscape Navigator ? Lotus Notes ? Excel ? Word ? Autocad ? I
>> mention the above because
>> A> They're cross platform running on at least 3 Seperate OS's
>> B> Have quite literally millions of users
>> C> Will never run on the shipped OS from a small Cambridge Firm.
>
>Your favourite applications are all excellent products. But just because
>RISC OS software doesn't have all the features and isn't 'industry
>standard' doesn't mean its users are some sort of idiots who have to be
>belittled at every oppotunity.
I am not belittling anyone, I did not make the assertion that the
solution to all the world's computing problems could be found in
!paint and !draw :-)
>RISC OS and its software has the
>following advantages:
>
>Easy to use.
>Efficient.
>Upgrades are cheap.
>Upgrades don't need a more powerful machine than the previous version
>just to achieve equivalent functionality, let alone use the new
>features on top. [1]
Huh ? Given the level of functionality and device support in products
like '95 and NT, The above argument does not wash. BTW how many schools
have arm2 based systems that cannot run the latest versions of RISC-OS ?
more than you would care to mention I reckon.
>Support is mostly free and there's a cosy 'community'. You can actually
>contact most of the software authors.
>
I'm sorry, but the above assertions are just a bunch of meaningless
platitudes, You have not demonstated how a risc-os based system could
integrate into a common business environment. Show me it's out of the box
multi-protocol network support, Show me it's PCI buses etc etc
>If you don't need the extra features and total industry standard
>interoperability, then there is nothing silly about Acorns.
>
Close but no cigar, 'interoperability' is where it's at, if you dont
have it, your systems will be marginalised and die.
>[1] For example, RISC OS "SA" is promised to run faster on an ARM 6 or 7
>than RISC OS 3.6. Compare and contrast with Windows.
>
>Oh, to take your point C. You think that's something to be proud of?
>
Huh.. Ask the guys in Cambridge why their platform has virtually
zero market penetration, Hence no software.
Mike Enderby
> In article <4quosu$q...@lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk>,
> dna...@cus.cam.ac.uk (David Allsopp) writes:
> >In article <Dtnzo...@systems.DHL.COM>,
> >Whilst your point is fair for Word etc, Netscape is irrelevant
> >because it's just a viewer - HTML is (sort of) standard, and any other browser
> >supporting the same standard(s) will do.
> >
>
> I don't agree, Netscape is the 'de facto' standard for Browsers and
> it's extensions to HTML, This comes from having ~85% of the browser market.
> Any Risc-os based browser supporting Frames or plug-ins yet ?
Netscape may have about 80% of the market but remember this is
divided between all the versions going back to 1.1 so only a
small proportion of users have all the latest 'features'.
The percentage is also falling as Microsoft's Internet Explorer
picks up market share. Plus who knows what will happen with the
NC?
--
Mike Enderby
http://www.interpages.co.uk - mi...@interpages.co.uk
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym.
Andy Ward
ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com (Greg Hennessy) wrote:
> I don't agree, Netscape is the 'de facto' standard for Browsers and
> it's extensions to HTML, This comes from having ~85% of the browser market.
> Any Risc-os based browser supporting Frames or plug-ins yet ?
Arcweb supports plug-ins - it's just that nobody's written any interesting
ones yet, and strangely enough x86 binary plug-ins are not going to be
much use on RISC OS ;-)
... and ANT have frames working in the NC version of their browser, so
we may see them in Fresco soonish.
--
Andy Ward |
an...@connectiv.co.uk | Connectiv Internet Consultants
Ted Lepley
> In article <internews...@argonet.co.uk> ted...@argonet.co.uk wrote:
>
> > A poor young student who uses Word 6 for his college work *normally*
> > reckons to re-install Word 6 on his 486 100MHz PC every month or so as it
> > gets too slow to keep up with his typing (and he can't type).
>
> Is this a problem with Word or is it just that the disc needs defraging?
>
Don't know, nor want to. Don't think he does either. Don't think he should
need to. But in any event, does re-installing Word defragment the disc?
This seems to cure the problem for a while.
He has the same/similar problem with Excel.
Your suggestion is appreciated though. This might be slightly quicker than
re-installing Word. I'll pass on the idea.
Ted.
Clifton College
>TH> RISC OS and its software has the
>TH> following advantages:
[snip]
>>Upgrades don't need a more powerful machine than the previous version
>>just to achieve equivalent functionality, let alone use the new
>>features on top.
>Huh ? Given the level of functionality and device support in products
>like '95 and NT, The above argument does not wash. BTW how many schools
>have arm2 based systems that cannot run the latest versions of RISC-OS ?
>more than you would care to mention I reckon.
What, A305s?
Seriously, it is not necessary to have ARM3s to run RISC OS 3. It
needs *less* memory than the old version due to apps in ROM; and while
it is slightly slower than RISC OS 2, it is still pretty quick on most
tasks.
[snip]
>You have not demonstated how a risc-os based system could
>integrate into a common business environment. Show me it's out of the box
>multi-protocol network support
ANT OmniClient... ?
>Show me it's PCI buses etc etc
Asking to be shown its PCI buses is like pointing at a bungalow and
criticising the lack of stairs.
The Risc PC's DEBI bus isn't as fast as PCI, but then the Risc PC has
integrated video memory so doesn't need a fast bus in the same way as
PCs. The DEBI bus is more than fast enough for the fastest hard discs,
digitisers, Ethernet cards, etc.
Ed Avis
Ian Griffiths
So why are they making claims as to how much faster their
machine is going to be with a StrongARM? You can't hope to make
a realistic guess without either knowing or at least making some
kind of assumption about this sort of thing.
--
Ian Griffiths
Greg Hennessy
Andy Ward <an...@connecti.demon.co.uk> writes:
>In article <Dtp4n...@systems.DHL.COM>
> ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com (Greg Hennessy) wrote:
>
>Arcweb supports plug-ins - it's just that nobody's written any interesting
>ones yet, and strangely enough x86 binary plug-ins are not going to be
>much use on RISC OS ;-)
>
Hmmm... I take it then a Shockwave plug-in is exceedingly unlikely ....
>.... and ANT have frames working in the NC version of their browser, so
>we may see them in Fresco soonish.
Javascript anyone ?
greg
Ian Griffiths
>
> The DEBI bus is more than fast enough for the fastest hard
> discs,
I think you'll find Barracudas go faster. Certainly any attempt
to do some kind of striping over decent disks over SCSI will
leave the DEBI bus gasping.
> digitisers,
Digitising what? You might be hard pressed to stream full
motion video. Depends on resolutions and frame rates and such
like.
The fastest digitisers are probably involved in video work of
some kind and beyond any desktop machine at a guess...
> Ethernet cards, etc.
The fastest ethernet cards currently widely available run at
100Mb/s, again faster than DEBI can cope with.
It's adequate for middling performance kit though, which is all
that most people really need.
--
Ian Griffiths
Greg Hennessy
he...@dial.pipex.com (Clifton College) writes:
>
>What, A305s?
>
>Seriously, it is not necessary to have ARM3s to run RISC OS 3. It
>needs *less* memory than the old version due to apps in ROM; and while
>it is slightly slower than RISC OS 2, it is still pretty quick on most
>tasks.
>
Well the story I heard was that 'slightly slower' on an ARM 2 does
not adequately describe it. How many posters to this group still use
plain vanilla arm 2 Hardware not many I guess.
>
>
>ANT OmniClient... ?
>
>>Show me it's PCI buses etc etc
>
>Asking to be shown its PCI buses is like pointing at a bungalow and
>criticising the lack of stairs.
>
:-), I like that, I must remember that analogy for the future.
>The Risc PC's DEBI bus isn't as fast as PCI,
Quite an understatement. Also factor in such cuties as busmastering
DMA and 132 mb/sec burstmode with sustained rates of 80 mb/sec and
DEBI lives up to the 'brain damaged' assertion I heard attributed to
it.
>but then the Risc PC has
>integrated video memory so doesn't need a fast bus in the same way as
>PCs.
So lack of a device independant graphics architecture is a advantage ?
>The DEBI bus is more than fast enough for the fastest hard discs,
>digitisers, Ethernet cards, etc.
But given a PCI bus and the plethora of hardware that goes with it, A PCI
based SA machine would just have to provide a device driver for the relevant
piece of existing hardware rather than re-invent the wheel each time to plug
hardware in to a unique bus design. This has been amply demonstrated with
the current crop of PC's Alphas and Powermacs running quite diverse OS's
IA. Nichols
: ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com (Greg Hennessy) wrote:
: >Show me it's PCI buses etc etc
: Asking to be shown its PCI buses is like pointing at a bungalow and
: criticising the lack of stairs.
And besides, there are a lot of PCs out there in businesses which don't
have PCI buses.
Bit of a red herring, that one.
--
________________________________________________________________________
* | An 8086 PC is a piece of s*** |
| / | |/-\ | A Pentium PC will slide off the shovel faster |
| | | | | | |
| \-/| | / | i.a.n...@bris.ac.uk |
| * http://emrs.chm.bris.ac.uk/ARUG/ |
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tony Houghton
Ian Griffiths <igri...@dev.madge.com> wrote:
[DEBI]*
> It's adequate for middling performance kit though, which is all
> that most people really need.
Exactly. So we don't appreciate being belittled long after someone goes
OTT with anti-PC propaganda; it's not even as if they did so in a PC
loyal group.
Hmm, I spot another case of the "PIN number" syndrome: "DEBI bus". :-)
Tony Houghton
In article <Dtp5s...@systems.DHL.COM>
ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com (Greg Hennessy) wrote:
> In article <50e1...@tonyh.tcp.co.uk>,
> Tony Houghton <to...@tcp.co.uk> writes:
>
> >Your favourite applications are all excellent products. But just because
> >RISC OS software doesn't have all the features and isn't 'industry
> >standard' doesn't mean its users are some sort of idiots who have to be
> >belittled at every oppotunity.
>
> I am not belittling anyone, I did not make the assertion that the
> solution to all the world's computing problems could be found in
> !paint and !draw :-)
Here you go again, belittling RISC OS users. Perhaps you don't realise
you're doing it, but you are. What you do keep asserting is that any
RISC OS software is not the solution to anything at all, just because it
isn't Microsoft or Netscape software.
What are you going to do when Netscape goes out of fashion in favour of
MSIE? Presumably you'll conveniently forget how you used to be such a
Netscape advocate.
> >RISC OS and its software has the
> >following advantages:
> >
> >Easy to use.
> >Efficient.
> >Upgrades are cheap.
> >Upgrades don't need a more powerful machine than the previous version
> >just to achieve equivalent functionality, let alone use the new
> >features on top. [1]
>
> Huh ? Given the level of functionality and device support in products
> like '95 and NT, The above argument does not wash. BTW how many schools
> have arm2 based systems that cannot run the latest versions of RISC-OS ?
> more than you would care to mention I reckon.
If you're going to shoot off into the realms of fantasy then I claim
with equal validity that Windows doesn't count for anything because it
doesn't support ARM. <Hennessy mode> Just because I use an Acorn it
means that everybody who doesn't is a sadly deluded idiot. There are
thousands of users to back me up. All those idiots who think that their
computer is standard because they don't know a GUI from a GPF don't
count for anything. </Hennessy mode>
BTW these schools "lumbered" with old Acorns are still using them
because they can. Even if they don't run the latest version of RISC OS
they can still be used with relevant software. Your argument is a
desperate distortion of the true situation dreamed up by pressured
salesmen. If the school had bought PCs in the first place they wouldn't
now magically have enough money to chuck out the 286s and get Pentiums.
How many times have you heard people arguing that Mondeos are useless
because people still drive Sierras?
> >Support is mostly free and there's a cosy 'community'. You can actually
> >contact most of the software authors.
> >
>
> I'm sorry, but the above assertions are just a bunch of meaningless
> platitudes, You have not demonstated how a risc-os based system could
> integrate into a common business environment. Show me it's out of the box
> multi-protocol network support, Show me it's PCI buses etc etc
What do you think you are calling meaningless platitudes when you're
still posting your hackneyed dogma after I've stated why I think Acorns
are suitable for *some* people like me, even though they aren't for you?
You show me the common business environment in my house. Or the
catalogue in which every single PC comes with all the networking cards
you can think of. Show me a school using OmniClient with an Acorn
SchoolServer or whatever where the setup doesn't work.
> Close but no cigar, 'interoperability' is where it's at, if you dont
> have it, your systems will be marginalised and die.
It's been marginalised for nearly 10 years without dying and it's now
getting huge support from American companies. It does have a degree of
interoperability for people who prefer RISC OS but really do need
occasional interoperability (and that is all they need).
Follow-ups set to csa.advocacy.
Tony Houghton
> I don't agree, Netscape is the 'de facto' standard for Browsers and
> it's extensions to HTML, This comes from having ~85% of the browser market.
> Any Risc-os based browser supporting Frames or plug-ins yet ?
Plug-ins. Those things that a certain other Netscape fan claims need
"too much mucking about" so he'd rather use animated GIFs for
everything?
AIUI one job of plug-ins is to get things that you download from the
Internet to run/play or whatever. All an Acorn browser has to do is
Filer_Run it. Acorn owners are well familiar with the concept of files
that load their applications as well as the other way round and know how
to make sure it works.
I'm sure plug-ins go a lot further and allow Netscape to display files
it doesn't know about itself in its own windows. Personally I don't
think that forcing certain files to be displayed in a separate
application is a problem, as long as plain images are displayed inline.
If having files that are currently supported only by Netscape integrated
into web pages becomes popular, then they will end up being supported by
NC and therefore RISC OS. Acrobat PDF is probably inevitable, much to
the disgust of purists, and I believe Aspex are releasing a VRML viewer
module in the same vein that CC did with Artworks.
Ian Lynch
> So why are they making claims as to how much faster their machine is
> going to be with a StrongARM? You can't hope to make a realistic guess
> without either knowing or at least making some kind of assumption about
> this sort of thing.
Most people aren't, one or two in this thread are. And most people
will base their judgements on seeing the demos and using one. They
will not be bothered as long as it works.
--
Ian
Jon
<mailto:ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com> wrote:
>
> In article <50e1...@tonyh.tcp.co.uk>,
> Tony Houghton <to...@tcp.co.uk> writes:
not
> >> bringing my attention to the landmark software you have mentioned abov=
e.
> >> NOT. Where is Netscape Navigator ? Lotus Notes ? Excel ? Word ? Autoca=
d ? I
> >> mention the above because
Excel 'running' on a Mac?
> >> =09B> Have quite literally millions of users
AutoCAD?
> >> =09C> Will never run on the shipped OS from a small Cambridge Firm.
Will never run on Windows. Partially running is not useful.
MicroSoft makes more money from software upgrades than most of
it's sales. How are they going to keep forcing their users to
upgrade? Ensure that the software doesn't work perfectly. Add
a couple of gimmicks on each release and corporations will
clammer to throw their money at you for the next upgrade.
> >RISC OS and its software has the
> >following advantages:
> >
> >Easy to use.
> >Efficient.
> >Upgrades are cheap.
> >Upgrades don't need a more powerful machine than the previous version
> >just to achieve equivalent functionality, let alone use the new
> >features on top. [1]
>
> Huh ? Given the level of functionality and device support in products
> like '95 and NT,
Yes, MicroSoft invented Plug and Play and are the only company
to have ever supported it. Just look at the AOL support...
> The above argument does not wash. BTW how many schools
> have arm2 based systems that cannot run the latest versions of RISC-OS ?
Most software will run on RISC OS 3.1 which is available on ARM2
machines. That is more than can be said for Windows 95.
BTW how many businesses have 486 based PCs which are too slow
for running the latest version of Windows+Apps? Not to mention
the RAM and HD upgrades necessary to make it usable...
IMHO that was a very poor comparison to make, given you stance
on the matter.
> >Support is mostly free and there's a cosy 'community'. You can actually
> >contact most of the software authors.
>
> I'm sorry, but the above assertions are just a bunch of meaningless
> platitudes, You have not demonstated how a risc-os based system could
> integrate into a common business environment. Show me it's out of the box
> multi-protocol network support, Show me it's PCI buses etc etc
Surely you jest? Why are multiple PCI buses in a single box
essential for a system to 'integrate into a common business
environment'? Why *multi-protocol* network support?
I suppose the lack of a sound or graphics card also means that
Acorn systems must be useless?
> >If you don't need the extra features and total industry standard
> >interoperability, then there is nothing silly about Acorns.
>
> Close but no cigar, 'interoperability' is where it's at, if you dont
> have it, your systems will be marginalised and die.
Then why haven't Acorn died?
Jon.
Jon
<mailto:ghen...@www.lhr-sys.dhl.com> wrote:
>
> In article <4r0o8i$4...@soap.news.pipex.net>,
> he...@dial.pipex.com (Clifton College) writes:
> >
> >What, A305s?
> >
> >Seriously, it is not necessary to have ARM3s to run RISC OS 3. It
> >needs *less* memory than the old version due to apps in ROM; and while
> >it is slightly slower than RISC OS 2, it is still pretty quick on most
> >tasks.
> >
>
> Well the story I heard was that 'slightly slower' on an ARM 2 does
> not adequately describe it. How many posters to this group still use
> plain vanilla arm 2 Hardware not many I guess.
There are probably a higher percentage of ARM2 users in these
parts than 80386SX users in the PC groups...
> >but then the Risc PC has
> >integrated video memory so doesn't need a fast bus in the same way as
> >PCs.
>
> So lack of a device independant graphics architecture is a advantage ?
Cost, simplicity, ease of use, speed...
> >The DEBI bus is more than fast enough for the fastest hard discs,
> >digitisers, Ethernet cards, etc.
>
> But given a PCI bus and the plethora of hardware that goes with it, A PCI
> based SA machine would just have to provide a device driver for the relevant
> piece of existing hardware rather than re-invent the wheel each time to plug
> hardware in to a unique bus design. This has been amply demonstrated with
> the current crop of PC's Alphas and Powermacs running quite diverse OS's
Quite true.
Jon.
Dr P.C. Davidson
>In article <4r0o8i$4...@soap.news.pipex.net>,
>he...@dial.pipex.com (Clifton College) writes:
>>
>>What, A305s?
>>
>>Seriously, it is not necessary to have ARM3s to run RISC OS 3. It
>>needs *less* memory than the old version due to apps in ROM; and while
>>it is slightly slower than RISC OS 2, it is still pretty quick on most
>>tasks.
>>
>
>Well the story I heard was that 'slightly slower' on an ARM 2 does
>not adequately describe it. How many posters to this group still use
>plain vanilla arm 2 Hardware not many I guess.
>
Well, even though 'slightly' is a slightly subjective term, I'd still
have to say you heard wrong. My brother was using an A310 with ARM2 and
RISCOS 3.11 for about 18 months. It slowed down *slightly* but that
was all. No measurements taken but it *felt* about 10-15% slower on
wimp updates. In my book that's slightly, although I grant that in
yours that might be a lot.
cheers