RE: GEM and memory protection

[Jo Even Skarstein <joska@nuts.edu>]

On Wed, 3 Jun 1998, Howard Chu wrote:

> The DSP cannot drastically improve things since you communicate with it
> via a serial bus clocked at around 1 MB per second.

Erm... The DSP is connected directly to the bus, and communicating
with it is just as "fast" as with the SCSI-controller. If you're
writing to a SCSI-disk on the Falcon, you could pipe data through the
DSP (filter/compress/whatever) without any loss in speed. Perhaps a
slight (a few cycles) lag, but just as fast. No make that *faster* -
I'd guess 50-100% faster with uncompressed data.

> As I recall, the TT SCSI controller maxes out around 4 MB/sec, and Falcon
> maybe
> around 2.5? (Feel free to correct these figures...) ACSI maxes out at 1

I don't know about the TT, but the Falcon can't do more than 1.8Mb/s.
Pretty pathetic stuff...

> Despite the nice goodies included in the Falcon, it really is not a very
> high-performance system. The TT is still the best 680x0 machine design
> Atari ever built.

If the Falcon had had a 32-bit bus and a better SCSI-controller, it
would have been a killer. The sad fact is that even a standard Amiga
1200 is faster than a Falcon...


/*
** Jo Even Skarstein    http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~josk/
**
**    beer - maria mckee - atari falcon - babylon 5
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