Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!yale!eagle!jtreworgy
From: jtreworgy@eagle.wesleyan.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re:  Lies, lies, they're telling us lies...
Message-ID: <4385@eagle.wesleyan.edu>
Date: 1 Dec 89 11:14:42 GMT
References: <5003@nigel.udel.EDU>
Lines: 36

In article <5003@nigel.udel.EDU>, acm131@eric.ccs.northeastern.edu (Craig Scott Lennox) writes:
> In Message-Id: <544@xdos.UUCP> Doug Merritt <doug@xdos.CCS.Northeastern.EDU>
> writes:
> 
>> Ok, that said, he's not altogether wrong. But it should be rephrased:
>> "...*forces* you to write more modular code". Mostly :-) about that part.
>> There's nothing wonderful about being forced to break huge data structures
>> into smaller 64K chunks. Nor for code, for that matter.
> 
> Well, according to the IBM rep, there *is*.  And this is one place where I
> couldn't figure out if he was giving me a line of crap or not.  But he said
> that segmented architecture makes multi-tasking more efficient, because to
> change context you merely reload the code, data, and stack segments.  Instead
> of copying the entire contents of page zero, out and in, etc. etc.  Of
> course, whe I pressed him as to why 8 Mhz Amiga 1000's with 512K can
> multi-task better than his 33Mhz PS/2's he had no satisfactory answer,
> but still... for future reference, I'd like to know, is this a legitimate
> issue?
> 
He's full of it... the Amiga doesn't copy code in and out of page 0 (maybe a
Macintosh does for task switching)... the Amiga simply uses relocatable code.
The 33Mhz PS/2 was not designed with task switching in mind.

However, doesn't the '386 fix the 64k chunk problem (in virtual mode)? I think
it has something like 2^32 bit chunks instead of 2^16 bit chunks.

> 
> 					Craig.
> 
>         ///
>        ///	"Hey OS/2, wanna race???"
>    \\\///
>     \XX/	acm131@eric.ccs.northestern.edu
-- 
James A. Treworgy    -- No quote here for insurance reasons --
jtreworgy@eagle.wesleyan.edu         jtreworgy%eagle@WESLEYAN.BITNET