Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!munnari.oz.au!comp.vuw.ac.nz!actrix!templar!jbickers From: jbickers@templar.actrix.gen.nz (John Bickers) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Re: Blitter vs. 040 (was: Computer Architecture question Message-ID: <3602.tnews@templar.actrix.gen.nz> Date: 11 May 91 08:54:43 GMT References: <3310.tnews@templar.actrix.gen.nz><1991May9.070349.15151@neon.Stanford.EDU><3496.tnews@templar.actrix.gen.nz> Organization: TAP, NZAmigaUG. Lines: 46 Quoted from by melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger): > Hmmm. So, how well can the NeXT perform animation? The 68040 is Who knows, who cares. If you're going to do native animations, do them in color, etc. > definitely faster than 2 68030s. In an 040 A3000 does the blitter Really? Faster than 2 68030s at this sort of memory intensive operation? > become a bottleneck. Meaning could things be done faster if the CPU As kdarling points out quite often, things are _already_ done faster if the CPU is used instead. It depends on the kind of animation involved, and for the delta animations (or whatever they are called) the Blitter is next to useless. For some block and line operations too, the Blitter is not useless, but it is slower. Depending on the CPU one happens to have. > was used instead? The blitter must offer some functionality that a > "normal" CPU doesn't. What it offers is limited co-processing. So while on an Amiga 3000, say, the CPU might be able to zap an image to the screen faster than the Blitter, the application should perhaps use the Blitter and let the CPU do other important things alongside it. This doesn't seem to be applicable to delta animations, but it is important when you want to run a line drawing demo alongside a ray tracer, for example. The same thing applies to all the things that can be offloaded onto coprocessors. A 68040 CPU might process a Postscript file a tad faster than a 68020 laser printer, and the same CPU might pump data through a sound thingo (DAC?) faster than a DMA-driven sound chip, and the same CPU might pump data to/from disk faster than a DMA-driven disk IO chip, and the same CPU might draw to the display faster than a drawing chip, but put them all together... ...and you have a giant PClone! :) > -Mike -- *** John Bickers, TAP, NZAmigaUG. jbickers@templar.actrix.gen.nz *** *** "Endless variations, make it all seem new" - Devo. ***