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 Create the fastest Amiga in the world with CyberStorm MK-II 50 MHZ.
 Review of Phase5 CyberStorm MK-II 68060 50 MHZ for Amiga 3000.

 All values are in minutes:seconds [hundreds]. Smaller time values
 indicate higher speed.

 This document and the included charts are copyright 1996 Bahman Moallem.
 Any form of redistribution without written permission is prohibited.

Have a look at the screenshots of the 68060 - CyberVision64 Amiga
system that was used for these tests. You can view the original
1024x768 images by clicking at the thumbnails of them.

My desktop 1 My desktop 4

Can you resist? ;)

Follow this link to see additional information about the Amiga that
was used for the following tests
.

The 68060:

Do you know the word "fast"?

In the fall of 1977 in Austin, Texas the Motorola engineers were
gathered to design a microprocessor to succeed the companie's 8-bit
6800 chip. Some pushed the idea of a 16-bit chip, double the
bandwidth of its predecessor while the more ambitious argued for a
chip with a 32-bit internal architecture. The go-getters group won,
and in July of 1979 the Motorola 68000 CPU was introduced.

Faster, more robust versions of the CPU, including the not so common
68010, 68020 (Amiga 1200), 68030 (Amiga 3000) and 68040 (Amiga 4000)
gave the power hungry user a boost, but the big leap for the Amiga
users come in the form of the 68060.
With its 90 MIPS (millions of instructions per second) and 89286
Dhrystones per second, the 68060 50 MHZ is 260 times faster than the
original 0.35 MIPS 68000 that powered millions of Amiga 500s, 1000s
and 2000s.

Motorola's 060 is a 32-bit processor with a superscalar, pipelined
architecture. It has more than 2 million transitors, using a 0.5-
micron, triple-layer metal, 3.3 volt process in a static design.

Separated in the 060 are instruction caches and data caches;
instruction fetch pipelines (with four-stage instruction processor,
a physically-mapped 8Kbyte instruction cache with four-way self
associative, a virtually mapped, 256-entry branch cache and a FIFO
instruction buffer), and operand execution pipelines (with four-
stage operand processor, a physically mapped 8Kbyte data cache with
4-way interleaving and a 4-entry, 32-bit write buffer).

68060 has the ability to execute more than one instruction per
clock cycle due to two parallel instruction pipelines for integer
instruction and also a third pipeline for floating point
instructions. The chip also has the ability to do branch prediction
to increase the speed even more.

View the complete Motorola 68060 facts sheet here.

CyberStorm MK-II:

CyberStorm MK-II for the A3000(T) A4000(T) from the German company
Phase5 features:

Review of the MK-II:

Soon

And what about the future:

Phase5 PowerUp uppgrade allows your Amiga to run 680x0 and PPC
native programs at the same time.

More information soon. Soon

68030 25 MHZ vs 68060 50 MHZ:

68030 25 MHZ vs 68060 50 MHZ
                                        68030 25 MHZ   68060 50 MHZ 
Boot [network OFF] 00:54 00:22
Scenery Animator, 24bit IFF 1024x768
frame, Yosemite.land, all details ON
31:32 04:32
LHA, compressing a text file of 1.6 MB 00:51 00:10
LZX, compressing a text file of 1.6 MB 00:58 00:14
LHA, uncompressing the above archive 00:08 00:01 [50]
LZX, uncompressing the above archive 00:06 00:01 [35]
LHA, complete backup of XDH0: my boot
partition, 47 MB, 4771 files, 443 dirs
54:08 10:31
Image cataloguing of 49 mainly 800x600
JPG files to one JPG file using
ImageFX v1.51 Cover Disk version
35:19 03:39
CygnusEditor, CED, replacing 3795
"and"s to "Amiga"s
00:05 [17] 00:01 [46]
DMS, compressing PARBENCH disk in RAD: 00:50 00:12
DMS, umcompressing the above file 00:09 [34] 00:02 [10]
MagicNews analyzing and filtering a
2.4 MB UseNet news packet
03:40 00:38
IBrowse showing a WEB page containing
several JPG and GIF files on a 16bit
screen
00:25 00:02
Complete rebuild of NetInstall, the
internet installer for Amiga
01:21 00:10
 
Notes:

AIBB benchmarks:

The old benchmark program for the Amiga,
AIBB, Amiga Intuition Based
Benchmarks, is not 68060 aware yet, and has been tricked into running
on the CyberStorm MK-II by pretending that the MK-II is a very fast
68040. ;)

This stops it using some later improvments to the instruction set. ;(

View the AIBB benchmarks, 20 640x200 GIF pictures with a sum of 285 KB.

WSpeed benchmarks:

WSpeed benchmarks give you an idea about the graphic speed of
various systems.

68060/50 MHZ CyberVision64 vs Amiga 4000 68040/25 MHZ AGA
      Compare          060/50 CV64       040/25 AGA       Difference
Put Pixels 2586883 205774 12.57
Draw Lines 43341 1123 38.59
Draw Hor/Ver 139824 1536 91.03
Draw Circles 112795 1155 97.66
Draw Ellipse 87148 1040 83.80
Draw Boxes 14653 138 106.18
Scroll X 3232 44 73.45
Scroll Y 3235 47 68.83
Print Texts 63715 2636 24.17
CON: Output 1739 371 4.69
Open Windows 539 75 7.19
Size Windows 1022 98 10.42
Move Windows 205 28 7.32
Swap Screens 34 480 0.07
Areafill 34624 180 192.36
 

68060/50 MHZ CyberVision64 vs 68040/28 MHZ PICASSO II
      Compare          060/50 CV64    040/28 Picasso II   Difference
Put Pixels 2586883 541182 4.78
Draw Lines 43341 14364 3.02
Draw Hor/Ver 139824 34128 4.10
Draw Circles 112795 34742 3.25
Draw Ellipse 87148 3046 28.61
Draw Boxes 14653 2148 6.82
Scroll X 3232 442 7.31
Scroll Y 3235 446 7.25
Print Texts 63715 10027 6.35
CON: Output 1739 436 3.99
Open Windows 539 171 3.15
Size Windows 1022 212 4.82
Move Windows 205 79 2.59
Swap Screens 34 24 1.42
Areafill 34624 427 81.09
 
Notes:

Larger values indicate higher speed.

Tests are performed on 256 colors screens.

As you can see the combination of MK-II and the excellent
CyberVision64 boost the Amiga into an ultra-fast workstation.
The Picasso II graphic board is many times faster than the Amiga's
native graphic system.

SystemInfo results:

The old good
SystemInfo has proven to be completely unreliable for
68060 systems. You should not trust the result of SystemInfo's
speed test at all.

For the fun of it, I ran SystemInfo and grabbed a snapshot of its
screen. Have a look at it and observe the comment that it outputed ;)

View the SystemInfo results, one 640x200 GIF pictures.

Real-life performance of a P90/Win95 vs A3000 68060/50:

Pentium 90 MHZ vs 68060 50 MHZ - The booting time
                                       Pentium 90 MHZ   68060 50 MHZ 
Boot [network OFF] 00:53 00:22
 
Notes:

The 68060 Amiga loads 32 user specific programs while it boots
resluting in a sum of 57 tasks in the system.

The P90 PC loads 3 very small user specific programs.

Pentium 90 MHZ vs 68060 50 MHZ - Communication programs
                                      Pentium 90 MHZ   68060 50 MHZ 
Non-stop scrolling through the entire
MessageBase of a message area in a
BBS - 520.415 KB of text
02:18 01:48
 
Notes:

The 68060 Amiga loads 33 user specific programs including term

The P90 PC loads 3 very small user specific programs and Win95's
HyperTerminal.

Pentium 90 MHZ vs 68060 50 MHZ - Editors
                                       Pentium 90 MHZ  68060 50 MHZ 
Loading. 00:02:52 00:01:47
Saving. 00:04:37 00:00:84
Replacing 1654 "Amiga"s with "ABC"s. 00:02:30 00:00:80
Selecting All. 00:01:47 00:00:32
Scrolling through the entire document
using the Page-Down key.
01:22:30 00:51:22
Alpha-sorting the entire document. 00:21:18 00:12:98
 
Notes:

All values are in minutes:seconds:hundreds. Smaller time values
indicate higher speed.

In order to test how the most popular 32bit text editor for
Windows95 stands vs CygnusEditor, the popular editor for the Amiga,
I grabbed the shareware copy of UltraEdit-32 version 4.10 from
www.windows95.com and installed it in the Pentium-PC.

A 1.9 MB ASCII file was used for the tests.

CygnusEditor lacks an internal sort-block funtion. To alpha-sort a
block of text, I use an AREXX script that cuts the marked block, saves
it to a temp file in T:, calls my own (old, dirty and not so optimized)
sort program that sorts the temp file and then loads it back into
CygnusEditor. Still Amiga sorts the file 50% faster than the PC.

As you can see, CygnusEditor is clearly faster than UltraEdit when
performing the above operations.

CygnusEditor for Amiga and UltraEdit for Windows95 are 2 very powerful
and feature-laden editors but CygnusEditor, like many other Amiga
programs, sports an AREXX port. With a few AREXX commands and
CygnusEditor you can do things that are virtually impossible to do
on a PC.

Even for these tests, the 68060 Amiga was loaded with 33 user specific
programs, whereas CygnusEditor was one of them while the P90 PC was
loaded with 3 very small user specific programs and of course UltraEdit.

More real-life tests become available soon. Soon  

How can a 50 MHZ 68060 be faster than a Pentium 90 MHZ?

To mention a few reasons:

The 68060 executes two instructions at the same time, just like the
Pentium and the Pentium Pro. The drawback of the Pentium series is
its instruction dependency as they can not execute two instructions
per clock all of the time. The instruction dependency of these chips
causes it to backtrack and change its execution sequence when one
instruction depends on another to finish before it can execute.
The Motorola 68060 suffers from this a lot less because of its dual
pipeline, instruction cache, data cache and branch cache.

The Pentium has 8 32bit integer registers and 8 64bit floating point
registers. The 68060 has 16 32bit integer registers and 16 64bit
floating point registers.

The 68060 has dual 8K cache, 0.5 micron static cmos allowing for
lower heat operation and the ability for the chip to run from a 3.3
volt power supply. The Intel Pentium is based on older 0.8 micron
and does not have these features. Also the Pentium requires more
transistors on chip to remain compatible with earlier Intel chips
which adds to the heat problem. The Pentium has something like 3.5
million transistors with larger 0.8 micron spacing and the 68060
gets the same preformance with 2 million transistors and tighter
0.5 micron spacing. The closer you get the tansistors together
and the fewer you have the lower the operating temperature of the
chip and the higher the frequency you can run the clock at.

The 68060 is faster even counting in MIPS (not that it matters that
much when you compare CPUs with different architecture) and it
needs a lot less instructions for the same amount of work.
An Intel Pentium 90 MHZ does 72427 Dhrystones/second while the
Motorola 68060 50 MHZ sports 89286 Dhrystones per second.

The main strength of the Amiga is in its ultra-fast Operating System
, AmigaOS. The 68060 50 MHZ is slightly faster than the Pentium
P90 in raw number-crunching operations as it will be proven later in
this document but because the Amiga does not have a ball-and-chain OS
like those popular ones available for IBM-PCs to deal with, the 68060
50 MHZ Amigas feels almost 2 times faster than the P90 PC in normal
real-life operations. I have also worked with a very expensive Win/NT
system running on a PentiumPro 166 MHZ - 128 MB 60 ns RAM - Matrox M
4 MB (VRAM) and that system is pretty much comparable to the 68060 -
CyberVision64 Amiga, at least if you do real-life multitasking
instead of using them as pure rendering engines.

Follow this link to see other advantages of the powerful AmigaOS.

Raw performance - P90/Win95 vs A3000 68060/50:

Compressing/uncompressing a mix of 1092 executales, pictures, fonts
etc in 1092 directories with a sum of 17.4 MB.

LHA and LZX on the Amiga and ARJ and WinZip on the PC were used for
the tests.

Compressing/uncompressing tests, Pentium 90 MHZ vs 68060 50 MHZ
      Packer          Archive size    Pentium 90 MHZ   68060 50 MHZ 
LHA - compress 6.809.315   02:22 
LZX - compress 5.372.314   02:12
ARJ - compress 6.736.215  02:02  
Zip - compress 6.803.286  02:11  
LHA - uncompress 6.809.315   00:59 
LZX - uncompress 5.372.314   00:55
ARJ - uncompress 6.736.215  01:04  
Zip - uncompress 6.803.286  01:02  
 
Notes:

As you can see in the above tests, Amiga-LZX packs 21% better
than latest versions of WinZip and ARJ at almost same time.

PC-LHA is not mentioned in the chart because I can't see anyone
using it. Nevermind, it took 03:18 for it to compress (6.829.539
bytes) and 01:15 seconds to uncompress the test directory/archive.

Amiga LHA does pack almost as good as the PC programs but is a
tad slower. Amiga LHA is old and has not been updated for a while.

A 68060 version of the Amiga-LZX is available to the registred
users (I am afraid that I am not one of them) and should boost
the performance of LZX even further.

As you can see in the above chart, both of the Amiga packers
uncompress slightly faster than the PC programs.

Performance of the SCSI/EIDE controller and the SCSI/IDE HD affect
the test results. While Amiga 3000's SCSI controller was one of the
fastest devices available at the time of its introduction, a much
faster SCSI expansion is available for the MK-II. The harddrive in
the Amiga is not so fast either due to its age.

The P90 PC is equipped with a high performance ASUS P55TP4N
motherboard that boosts a very fast PCI IDE controller right on
the main bus. The Seagate IDE harddrive in the PC is also much
faster than the old Quantum that is sitting in the A3000.

Adding the optional FAST SCSI-II DMA controller with a synchronous
transfer on the SCSI bus of up to 10 MB/Sec and a faster harddrive
should boost the performance of the 68060 Amiga much more.

The SCSI expansion of the MK-II was *not* used for these tests.

The bottom line is that the above tests are not fair because around
20 MB of data has to be read/written to/from the harddrives and
the PC is equipped with a faster controller and a MUCH faster
harddrive.

For the fun of it, I copied the test directory to the RAM: unit
of the Amiga 3000 and used LZX to pack/unpack data from/to RAM:
The result follows:

Compress   - 01:45 seconds
Uncompress - 00:19 seconds

Lightwave 3D rendering test, Pentium 90 MHZ vs 68060 50 MHZ
                                      Pentium 90 MHZ   68060 50 MHZ 
Test performed in CeBIT 1996 01:30 00:56
 
Notes:

Amiga Lightwave rendered the test picture faster than the P90 even
if it is not really optimized for the 68060 yet. ;)

Tips and tricks for 68060 users:

If you are having problems with a few older programs that crash on
your 68060 system, downgrade your 68060 *temporarily*. This should
eliminate the problems. Replace these kind of applications with
newer ones as soon as possible.

An old version 3.62 of TinyMeter that I am using here, tends to crash
now and then under 68060. To eliminate this problem I run it this way:

; Downgrade the 060 *temporarily*
C:CPU060 NI ND NS NB

C:CX/WBStarter DH0:System/Commodity/TinyMeter

; Back to the real thing ;)
C:CPU060 I D S B

If you have some memory left on the motherboard of your A3000 and
are facing problems with your harddrive, you better prove this one.
Change the MASK for your partitions to 0xfffffc and boot your
computer. Most of your problems should be gone.

This operation does not require a reformat of the actual partition
but do it at your own risk. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Snaphshot of the HDToolBox showing information about my boot
partition.

Other 68060 resources:

Blizzard 68060 on an A2000

Thanks:

I wish to thank, in no particular order, the following individuals/
companies for bringing this very exciting technology to reality:

Jay Miner (may he rest in peace), Gerald Carda, Dave Haynie,
Thomas Rudloff, Ralf Schmidt, Olaf Barthel, Thomas Sontowski,
Frank Mariak, Steve Krueger, Carl Sassenrath, Fred Fish ...

And the AmigaOS group:

AmigaOS group

And anyone else who has been participating in Amiga developmet.

Copyrights:

This document and the included charts are copyright 1996 Bahman Moallem.
Any form of redistribution without written permission is prohibited.

Amiga is a registred trademark of Amiga Technologies/VIScorp.
CyberStorm and CyberVision are registred trademarks of Phase5.
Microsoft and Microsoft Windows 95 are registred tradeark of
Microsoft Corp.
CTools and CTools logo are registred trademarks of CTools.
All program names mentioned in this page are either Copyright or
Trademark of respective owners.


Webpage Design by Bahman Moallem / CTools. Last Modified 29-Nov-96.
For comments, suggestions, questions E-Mail me at: bamo@algonet.se