ehsnsr@JUPITER.NMT.EDU (Eric Hobbs) (12/05/89)
Hi. Me again.
I have heard in circles that the Spectre GCR is faster than a 8MHz Mac
Plus. Just how much faster is faster? I you can, maybe you could give me some
benchmarks for comparison. Thanxs.
Also, I am thinking of trading my 520STfm up to an STE. I would like to
keep my Mono monitor even though it shuts me out of some neat stuff. I know
it has probably been posted before, but what are the improvements in the
graphics on an STE? If the improvements are mostly just with colors, I'll keep
the MONOmonitor. I really want 1meg, a DS/DD, and cool sound, so it sounds like
the STE might be for me? BTW, How much does a STE cost?
Eric Hobbs
ehsnsr@JUPITER.nmt.eduZ4648252@SFAUSTIN.BITNET (Z4648252) (12/07/89)
ERIC HOBBS writes:
" I have heard in circles that the Spectre GCR is faster than a 8MHz Mac
Plus. Just how much faster is faster? I you can, maybe you could give me some
benchmarks for comparison. Thanxs."
No benchmarks here, but I can tell you that SuperClock is off by
about eight minutes after the Spectre has come on-line in a one hour
period. By being off, I mean that it is eight minutes too fast. I
wish that Dave could fix that, but it does impress MACers who wonder
why my clock is always running fast.
Secondly, a good demo which shows how much faster Spectre GCR is
than a real Mac is Aldus's FreeHand self-running demo. After one
minute, the Spectre is about four pages ahead of a real Mac plus
equipped comparably, i.e., memory, hard drive, etc.
Also, putting a Mac Plus and Spectre equipped ST will reveal that
the Spectre offers a snappier screen. No doubt about it, the Spectre
is just faster.
Larry Rymal: |East Texas Atari 68NNNers| <Z4648252@SFAUSTIN.BITNET>dsmall@well.UUCP (David Small) (12/19/89)
This must be my night for notes.. *grin* The basenote discusses speed differences between the Mac Plus and GCR. One problem with marketing an "emulator" is people think it's slow. They see the CP/M emulator, PC-Ditto, and whatnot. The difference is running native 68000 machine code vs. interpreting 8080 or 8088 code. The ST runs at basically 8 mhz; the Mac basically also at 8. (plus or minus just a hair). Problem with the Mac is that video contention chops a good 20% off the processor. As I understand it, when the SE was designed, the PAL's that handle video contention were cleaned up; that's why the SEis 20% faster -- it got to where it should be. ApplePeople feel free to correct me; this is second hand. I do know in benchmarks at a certain techie MacMagazine, we were 21% ahead of the Plus in CPU, 4% ahead of the SE, and way behind the Mac II; however, the II is 68020/30 and 16 mhz, so that's unfair. Amazingly, the ST's hard disk kept even with the Mac II; the ST's Megafile 30 is no slouch at all in raw data transfer rate. The ST also uses DMA, the Mac II a loop-store scheme, so it's an unfair comparison. The thing that screws up most benchmarks is we run on a 70 hz vertical blank, corresponding to the Atari mono monitor. The benchmarks on the Mac run at 60 hz. Since most timer-tick programs dervice time-elapsed from this vertical blank, they're off on the Spectre. We are planning a 60 hz VBL "option", if you're willing to put up with desynced screen/animation, which will bring sound back to normal pitch and make benchmarks accurate once again, but that's in the future. Any timings right now should be on a stopwatch, and again,hard disk access just isn't fair; looping can't keep up with a DMA scheme that plugs in 16 words at a whock. I could make a case that DMA could outrun a RAMDISK. -- thanks, Dave / Gadgets p.s. The T-16 accelerator board takes the Spectre up to a "true" 12 mhz. This makes an amazing difference! Even with the moniterms, with their huge display memory, screens snap open and shut very fast. Recommended highly! .