Simtel MSDOS 1992 June/SIMTEL_0692.cdr/msdos/ventura/vpapp_5.arc/VPAPP_5.TXT

Text File | 1989-05-01 | 8KB | 163 lines

@PARAFILTR ON =

@BANNER = Ventura Publisher<M^><190><D>

@APP NOTE = Application Note #5

@NAME = Subjects:    Accelerator Cards<R>
    Speed improvement

Ventura Publisher is the only IBM PC desktop publishing program which
is fast enough to run on a good old-fashion IBM PC/XT running at a
4.77 MHz clock rate. Many people have been successfully producing
documents on these machines for many years.

However, while Ventura Publisher is much, much faster in drawing the
screen and managing documents than the competition, the IBM XT definitely
runs out of gas if your document contains lots of graphics or uses
many of Ventura Publisher's advanced features like column balance,
or Professional Extension features like tables and vertical justification.
In addition, even if you are accustomed to the screen draw speed on
an XT, you can dramatically improve your productivity by having the
screen draw faster.

Of course many of you are quite comfortable with your XT computer
and don't really want to upgrade to an AT or 386. However, for a modest
investment in a piece of hardware called an <MI>accelerator card<D>
you can improve performance of most Ventura Publisher operations by
a factor of three compared to <MI>a 6 MHz 8086<D> computer. The technology
described here should provide even greater percentage gains if installed
on a 4.77MHz 8088 XT.

This application note describes installing the <B>SOTA 286i<D> accelerator
card in a Xerox 6065 (this is identical to the ATT 6300 and Olivetti
M24). Although this particular accelerator card was chosen because
is received the highest marks in a number of magazine reviews, the
benchmark figures provided in this note give you some indication of
what to expect with other similar accelerator cards such as the Microsoft
Mach 20, Orchid Tiny Turbo, and AST Hotshot. Another alternative is
the Intel Inboard 386/PC which will outperform any of these, but of
course costs somewhat more. Street prices for the 286 accelerator
cards range from $250 to $450. Street prices for the Intel Inboard
386/PC seem to be about $600. Both the SOTA 286i and Microsoft Mach
20 have the option of accepting a companion 16-bit memory card which
allow them to achieve full AT performance (<B>12 MHz<D> AT performance
in the case of the SOTA 286i) and to run OS/2. This companion board
was not installed for these tests.

@HEAD 1 = Installation

To install the SOTA 286i card, you remove you computer's 8088 or 8086
processor, plug a cable (supplied with the card) into the now-empty
socket, place the old processor into the card, and then plug the card
into one of your computer's expansion slots. You then install a device
driver in your CONFIG.SYS file and that's it! Your same version of
DOS and all your programs still work, only faster. Using various hardware
techniques this board achieves up to 13.9 processing speed improvements
compared to the IBM XT. However, since most operations require accessing
large amounts of RAM and since this RAM is still accessed through
the XT's 8-bit bus, most speed improvements are not as great. In addition,
hard disk operations remain exactly the same speed, although since
many hard disk operations involve computation as well as data transfer,
you will notice significant speed improvement on some disk operations
such as opening Ventura Publisher chapters.

@HEAD 1 = Benefits

The real benefits for Ventura Publisher users of this technology are
in the following areas:

@BULLET 1 = <B>Screen redraw<D>. The time is takes to redraw a screen
is dramatically less. The SCOOP page redraws in <$E1/2> to <$E1/3>
the time required for an 8086 computer. Measure the redraw time (as
described on page 2) on your computer and compare with the figures
shown on page 3 to see what sort of improvement to expect.

@BULLET 1 = <B>Pagination<D>. If you move from page to page a lot
within a multi-page document, you know that Ventura Publisher formats
each inte<->rmediate page when you go from, say, page 3 to page 7.
As long as the document completely fits into conventional memory (or
in the case of the Professional Extension, EMS memory), this time
is determined entirely by the processor speed and RAM access times.
Therefore, even compared to an 8086 6-MHz system, you will see approximately
a 3x speed improvement.

@BULLET 1 = <B>Chapter loading<D>. Even though opening a chapter involves
significant disk access time and even though, as mentioned above,
disk throughput is not improved at all, Ventura Publisher requires
a significant amount of processing power to load a chapter because
of it creates a large number of internal data structures, and because
it inserts all possible hyphen into the text during the loading process.
Therefore loading times, especially with long documents or documents
containing a large number of paragraphs, such as lists, will load
significantly faster.

@HEAD 1 = Further speed improvements

You can further improve speed, potentially by a very large factor,
by purchasing an additional companion card to the SOTA 286i which
provides high speed memory and allows the SOTA 286i to access this
memory via an AT 16 bit bus. This card will be available in mid-1989
and sell for $295 list, unpopulated. It can hold up to 8 megabytes.
Once installed, you can still access the rest of the memory in the
system and use it for RAM disk or a print spooler.

In theory this 16-bit daughter board should give you the equivalent
performance to a 12MHz no wait state AT, except for disk operations
which will still be the same as before. It should also let you take
advantage of HIMEM.SYS which increases the conventional memory available
to Ventura Publisher by about 56K. This board was not tested, but
it is highly likely that theory will prove correct in this case.

This companion board also will allow the SOTA 286i run OS/2, although
with a slow hard disk this may not be all that useful.

@HEAD 1 = Description of tests

Test system: Xerox 6065 (Same as ATT 6300 or Olivetti M24). This is
an 8086 system that operates at 1.9 times the speed of the IBM XT.
Display: 600 x 400. 1.5 megabytes of EMS 4.0 supplied by Intel Above
Board Plus. 640K disk cache using Super PCKwik.

On-Screen Kerning was set to 18 in the <B>Set Preferences<D> option
in the Options menu.

The CONFIG.SYS file used when the SOTA 286i was installed is as follows:<$&Frame
1[v]>

Norton benchmarks were performed with the Norton Utilities version
4.5 SI program.

The Compatibility List chapter consists of 43K bytes of text formatted
into nine pages. It contains a very large number of paragraphs. This  results
in a large amount of calculation time during loading, but little disk
activity.

Screen redraw for the Compatibility List chapter on page one was much
longer than on page nine because most fonts on page one are italics
(for which no screen font exists). This forces Ventura Publisher to
scale the screen font in real time.

The SCOOP chapter times were included to give you figures against
which you can compare.

The loading time was measured from the time <B>OK<D> was selected
in the Item Selector until the Item Selector dialog box disappeared
and the screen began to draw.

The screen redraw time was measured from the time the ESC key was
pressed until the mouse cursor reappeared. The first screen redraw
time was ignored. The screen redraw measurement was then repeated
four times in a row and the results were averaged to yield the times
shown.

The Wordperfect, archive and unarchive measurement were provided to
give a sample of what can be expected for other programs.

Speed improvements vs. an 8088 system would likely be much greater.

Finally, selected benchmark times for an original Compaq Deskpro-286
are included for comparison against a low-end AT computer. The SOTA
286i meets or beats this computer in most tests.