CyberStorm MK-II:

And what about the future:

68030 25 MHZ vs 68060 50 MHZ:

Notes:

• [100] is equal to one second.
• Computers used for the tests:

• Amiga 3000 desktop.
• Motorola 68030 25 MHZ, 68882 FPU 25 MHZ.
• 16 MB of 70 ns Static Column Fast memory.
• CyberVision64 4 MB graphic card.
• 1.2 MB of SCSI harddrives.
• AmigaOS ROM version 3.1.
• Amiga 3000 desktop.
• Motorola 68060 50 MHZ, 68060 FPU 50 MHZ.
• 32 MB of 60 ns Fast memory.
• CyberVision64 4 MB graphic card.
• 1.2 MB of SCSI harddrives.
• AmigaOS ROM version 3.1.
• IBM-PC compatible.
• Intel Pentium 90 MHZ.
• 32 MB 60 ns Fast memory.
• ExpertColor64 2 MB PCI graphic card.
• 1.2 MB of fast EIDE harddrives.
• Windows95 (TM).
• Performance of the SCSI controller and the SCSI HD affect some of the test results. While Amiga 3000's SCSI controller was one of the fastest devices available at the time of its introduction , a much faster SCSI expansion is available for the MK-II. Adding this device and a faster harddrive should boost the performance of the 68060 Amiga even more.
  The SCSI expansion of the MK-II was *not* used for these tests.

AIBB benchmarks:

WSpeed benchmarks:

SystemInfo results:

Notes:

The 68060 Amiga loads 32 user specific programs while it boots resluting in a sum of 57 tasks in the system.

The P90 PC loads 3 very small user specific programs.

Pentium 90 MHZ vs 68060 50 MHZ - Communication programs
	Pentium 90 MHZ	68060 50 MHZ
Non-stop scrolling through the entire MessageBase of a message area in a BBS - 520.415 KB of text	02:18	01:48

 

Notes:

The 68060 Amiga loads 33 user specific programs including term

The P90 PC loads 3 very small user specific programs and Win95's HyperTerminal.

Pentium 90 MHZ vs 68060 50 MHZ - Editors
	Pentium 90 MHZ	68060 50 MHZ
Loading.	00:02:52	00:01:47
Saving.	00:04:37	00:00:84
Replacing 1654 "Amiga"s with "ABC"s.	00:02:30	00:00:80
Selecting All.	00:01:47	00:00:32
Scrolling through the entire document using the Page-Down key.	01:22:30	00:51:22
Alpha-sorting the entire document.	00:21:18	00:12:98

 

Notes:

All values are in minutes:seconds:hundreds. Smaller time values indicate higher speed.

In order to test how the most popular 32bit text editor for Windows95 stands vs CygnusEditor, the popular editor for the Amiga, I grabbed the shareware copy of UltraEdit-32 version 4.10 from www.windows95.com and installed it in the Pentium-PC.

A 1.9 MB ASCII file was used for the tests.

CygnusEditor lacks an internal sort-block funtion. To alpha-sort a block of text, I use an AREXX script that cuts the marked block, saves it to a temp file in T:, calls my own (old, dirty and not so optimized) sort program that sorts the temp file and then loads it back into CygnusEditor. Still Amiga sorts the file 50% faster than the PC.

As you can see, CygnusEditor is clearly faster than UltraEdit when performing the above operations.

CygnusEditor for Amiga and UltraEdit for Windows95 are 2 very powerful and feature-laden editors but CygnusEditor, like many other Amiga programs, sports an AREXX port. With a few AREXX commands and CygnusEditor you can do things that are virtually impossible to do on a PC.

Even for these tests, the 68060 Amiga was loaded with 33 user specific programs, whereas CygnusEditor was one of them while the P90 PC was loaded with 3 very small user specific programs and of course UltraEdit.

More real-life tests become available soon.   

How can a 50 MHZ 68060 be faster than a Pentium 90 MHZ?

To mention a few reasons:

The 68060 executes two instructions at the same time, just like the Pentium and the Pentium Pro. The drawback of the Pentium series is its instruction dependency as they can not execute two instructions per clock all of the time. The instruction dependency of these chips causes it to backtrack and change its execution sequence when one instruction depends on another to finish before it can execute. Motorola 68060 suffers from this a lot less because of its dual pipeline, instruction cache, data cache and branch cache.

The Pentium has 8 32bit integer registers and 8 64bit floating point registers. The 68060 has 16 32bit integer registers and 16 64bit floating point registers.

The 68060 has dual 8K cache, 0.5 micron static cmos allowing for lower heat operation and the ability for the chip to run from a 3.3 volt power supply. The Intel Pentium is based on older 0.8 micron and does not have these features. Also the Pentium requires more transistors on chip to remain compatible with earlier Intel chips which adds to the heat problem. The Pentium has something like 3.5 million transistors with larger 0.8 micron spacing and the 68060 gets the same preformance with 2 million transistors and tighter 0.5 micron spacing. The closer you get the tansistors together and the fewer you have the lower the operating temperature of the chip and the higher the frequency you can run the clock at.

The 68060 is faster even counting in MIPS (not that it matters that much when you compare CPUs with different architecture) and it needs a lot less instructions for the same amount of work. An Intel Pentium 90 MHZ does 72427 Dhrystones/second while the Motorola 68060 50 MHZ sports 89286 Dhrystones per second.

The main strength of the Amiga is in its ultra-fast Operating System , AmigaOS. The 68060 50 MHZ is slightly faster than the Pentium P90 in raw number-crunching operations as it will be proven later in this document but because the Amiga does not have a ball-and-chain OS like those popular ones available for IBM-PCs to deal with, the 68060 50 MHZ Amigas feels almost 2 times faster than the P90 PC in normal real-life operations. I have also worked with a very expensive Win/NT system running on a PentiumPro 166 MHZ - 128 MB 60 ns RAM - Matrox M 4 MB (VRAM) and that system is pretty much comparable to the 68060 - CyberVision64 Amiga, at least if you do real-life multitasking instead of using them as pure rendering engines.

LHA and LZX on the Amiga and ARJ and WinZip on the PC were used for
the tests.

Compressing/uncompressing tests, Pentium 90 MHZ vs 68060 50 MHZ
Packer	Archive size	Pentium 90 MHZ	68060 50 MHZ
LHA - compress	6.809.315		02:22
LZX - compress	5.372.314		02:12
ARJ - compress	6.736.215	02:02
Zip - compress	6.803.286	02:11
LHA - uncompress	6.809.315		00:59
LZX - uncompress	5.372.314		00:55
ARJ - uncompress	6.736.215	01:04
Zip - uncompress	6.803.286	01:02

 

Notes:

As you can see in the above tests, Amiga-LZX packs 21% better than latest versions of WinZip and ARJ at almost same time.

PC-LHA is not mentioned in the chart because I can't see anyone using it. Nevermind, it took 03:18 for it to compress (6.829.539 bytes) and 01:15 seconds to uncompress the test directory/archive.

Amiga LHA does pack almost as good as the PC programs but is a tad slower. Amiga LHA is old and has not been updated for a while.

A 68060 version of the Amiga-LZX is available to the registred users (I am afraid that I am not one of them) and should boost the performance of LZX even further.

As you can see in the above chart, both of the Amiga packers uncompress slightly faster than the PC programs.

Performance of the SCSI/EIDE controller and the SCSI/IDE HD affect the test results. While Amiga 3000's SCSI controller was one of the fastest devices available at the time of its introduction, a much faster SCSI expansion is available for the MK-II. The harddrive in the Amiga is not so fast either due to its age.

The P90 PC is equipped with a high performance ASUS P55TP4N motherboard that boosts a very fast PCI IDE controller right on the main bus. The Seagate IDE harddrive in the PC is also much faster than the old Quantum that is sitting in the A3000.

Adding the optional FAST SCSI-II DMA controller with a synchronous transfer on the SCSI bus of up to 10 MB/Sec and a faster harddrive should boost the performance of the 68060 Amiga much more.

The SCSI expansion of the MK-II was *not* used for these tests.

The bottom line is that the above tests are not fair because around 20 MB of data has to be read/written to/from the harddrives and the PC is equipped with a faster controller and a MUCH faster harddrive.

For the fun of it, I copied the test directory to the RAM: unit of the Amiga 3000 and used LZX to pack/unpack data from/to RAM: The result follows:

Compress   - 01:45 seconds
Uncompress - 00:19 seconds

Lightwave 3D rendering test, Pentium 90 MHZ vs 68060 50 MHZ
	Pentium 90 MHZ	68060 50 MHZ
Test performed in CeBIT 1996	01:30	00:56

 

Notes:

Amiga Lightwave rendered the test picture faster than the P90 even if it is not really optimized for the 68060 yet. ;)

From "Amiga Report Online Magazine #5.03 -- March 22, 1997"
[The canonical Lightwave test of a year or so ago put an 060/50 and a P90 on roughly equal footing. -Jason]

Other 68060 resources:

Thanks:

Copyrights:

Amiga is a registred trademark of Amiga International.
CyberStorm and CyberVision are registred trademarks of Phase5.
Microsoft and Microsoft Windows 95 are registred tradeark of Microsoft Corp.
CTOOLS and CTOOLS logo are registred trademarks of CTOOLS.
All program names mentioned in this page are either Copyright or Trademark of respective owners.