Re: What do you do with an Apple //?

[nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <Pine.SOL.3.96.970724163454.3547A-100000@ai.asu.edu>,
Adam Myrow  <adam.myrow@asu.edu> wrote:
>Of course a 13 MHZ gs runs faster than a 25 MHZ 486.  The GS's clock-rating
>(according to many sources) should be multiplied by 4 to get the PC
>equivalent.

   Bzzzt, you misremember. Comparing the 65xx against the 8086 (and
8088, 80186 and 80286 also I think), plus the 68000 (and probably thru
68020), there is the magic number of '4' because that's the ratio of
bus clocks needed to get a byte out of memory. On the 65xx, it takes 1
bus cycle to read or write a byte (instruction opcode, memory value,
all the same) from memory. The early 80x86s and 680x0s all took 4
clock cycles to move data. However, they soon realized that was very
inefficient, and definitely by the 486 and 68040, both families were
down to 1 clock cycle busses. [And they've gone to wider data paths,
internal caches, etc]

>Thus 13 MHZ*4 = 52 MHZ.  I heard this here on the newsgroup as well
>as the Apple II history.  So this statistic that Scott G quotes all
>the time makes perfect sense.

   Nope. It's only the slow GUI OS and a laptop (historically
underpowered in terms of system bus and video versus desktop boxen)
that's dropping Scott's laptop to a crawl. [And a 486/25? That's
easily 1/10 the speed of any modern PC/Mac]. Dump the bloated OS and
hit the system more on the metal with games, and the GS can't hold a
candle to that PC-- 386/33s (maybe 2/3 the speed of a 486/25) can
handle DOOM fullscreen. The GS is having BIG problems with Wolf, a far
simpler design. 

   Apple's costcutting (so they could rake in bigger profits, Randy)
to a 1Mhz bus on the GS is that cripples it in realworld usage. Sure,
the GS has had more than its fair sure of really efficient coders over
the years to try and make up for the Apple-induuced
shortcomings. However, general consumers are not going to flock to the
GS simply because by by adding in enough hardware to overcome the
builtin limitations you can approach something only 5 years
old. They'd rather buy a 5 year old PC for next to nothing and get
more power right of the box than have to hunt down used accelerator
cards and a soldering iron.

   The GS wins on user friendliness and sound (well, versus Macs... my
PC has a SB AWE32 ($59 street or so now) with FM Synth, OPL3 MIDI, 32
voice digitized sample playback/recording and 512K (8x the GS's) ram
builtin-- plus SIMM sockets for expandability). The GS does *not* win
computing or graphical power by a long shot; anyone who's claiming
that has their head screwed on backwards.

Natn Mates

--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/      <*>
# What are the facts? Again and again and again-- what are the _facts_?
# Shun wishful thinking, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors
# think-- what are the facts, and to how many decimal places?  -R.A. Heinlein