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From: news@bmers58.UUCP (news)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Comparison of GVP 030, A2630, A2630
Message-ID: <1271@bmers58.UUCP>
Date: 23 Jan 90 20:28:09 GMT
Reply-To: uunet!bnrgate!atreus!keithh (Keith Hanlan)
Organization: Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 45

The local dealer (Lynx) did a side-by-side comparison of the
GVP and CBM accelerators on Saturday. The test involved using
Scupt Animate 4D to wire-frame -> rough ray-trace -> some finished
product.

	With a stock 68000 Amiga the exercise took 8 1/2 hours        100
	With the 2620 board                        1 1/2 hours         17.6%
	With the 2630 board at 25 MHz        about 40 minutes           7.8%
	With the GVP 3001 board at 25 MHz a little (maybe 5%) faster    7.4%

Now GVP is shipping with 28 MHz and by summer will be shipping with
33 MHz. Obviously, the speed won't scale linearly but it should get
even faster. Does anybody know if CBM is going to up their clock 
at all? Dave?

Some thoughts:
  o You pay a fair bit for the added performace of the GVP board,
    largely because of the expensive page-mode RAM. See prices below.

  o It's only a single test and one that is very floating point
    intensive at that. I would really like to have seen some other tests.
	In particular, I'd like to see their effect on disk I/O and on
    multi-tasking; these are the subjective things that the end-user
	actually feels *while* he's using the box. Letting the box sit in
	a corner is only partially useful.

  o I'm still leery of GVP because of the way the advertise their
    controller as "DMA to an on-board 64K cache" That's not the spirit
	of DMA!! Now maybe their engineers are more ethical than their
	marketing types...

Prices: CANADIAN! 
  2630 board with 2M of 32bit RAM         CDN$2295
	   additional 2M for 4M on-board      CDN $500 (estimate)
	   daughterboard for additional 2/4MB not released
  3001 board with no RAM                  CDN$1750
			 with 4M                      CDN$3795  ($2295 separately)
			 with 8M                      CDN$4595  ($1000 separately)

I'd be partial to the CBM board with these figures.

Any comments?
Keith Hanlan
Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada 613-765-4645
uunet!bnrgate!atreus!keithh or (via bitnet) keithh@bnr.ca