A3640 vs pcc cyberstorm ?

[Euphoria]

Hi :
Can anyone tell me what the main issues / differences in performance between an a3640 with a 68060 and a pcb cyberstorm would be. I know the pcb has ram on board and other peripherals.
However running Amiga os 3.1 only. Is the processing speed fairly similar if 256mb of ram is accompanied with the a3640 ?


regards
euphoria

 

[User2921]

Hi!

The 040 and 060 processors will have a significant performance difference, depending on what you're doing. Additionally, the clock speed of the CSPPC is significantly faster. There is no way to attach 256MB of RAM to an a3640 unless you use Zorro III RAM, which is much slower than the onboard RAM in a CSPPC.

Additionally, you won't be able to use anything that requires a powerpc card without the CSPPC.

In other words, a _significant_ difference, unless you just plan to use the Amiga for casual WHDLoad and stuff like that, in which case it won't be worthwhile.

 

[trixster]

You can't add any ram to the 3640 without finding a very rare (and no doubt incredibly expensive) add on card like the X-Calibur http://amiga.resource.cx/search.pl?product=xcalibur
The A3640 has to access the motherboard ram or z3 ram and both are considerably slower than local ram on a cpu card like the Cyberstorm or GVP or Warpengine. As an example, whilst my 50mhz 060 Cyberstorm Mk2 gives about 66 MIPS and my 64mhz 060 A3640 returns 85MIPS, both Doom and Quake run noticeably faster on the Cyberstorm despite the slower clock due to the faster ram access. Memory access speed on the A3640 with 2 wait states removed is in the region of 15-16MB/s whereas of the lower clocked Cyberstorm is about double that.

you can use the the PPC for stuff like WinAMP and no doubt a few other things, but I've got to say I can't really see the point in the expense of PPC if you're sticking with 3.1 or 3.9... but that's a different discussion

Here are the Sysspeed results for an A3640 with 64Mhz 060 and the machine state mod to remove 2 waitstates. This improves memory access by about 20% over a stock A3640



The following pic shows the Cyberstorm mk2 50mhz, a blizzard 1260 80mhz, a 25mhz 040 on an a3640 with the waitstate mod, a stock A4000 040 25mhz