DISCUSSION A: The overall (subjective) feeling of the UAE and Fellow emulators
(without JIT technology) is that a Pentium CPU
running at 133 MHz compares well with an Amiga 500, providing enough usability for tasks
such as word processing and programs such as Personal Paint, but no real
time emulation of the Amiga custom chips. Additionally, RTG
screen modes not only offer high end graphics features, but make the emulation run faster
than with the original Amiga modes. It certainly makes an impressive and very useful Amiga
notebook. The use of sound, custom chip logic and the type of frame refresh rates used in
many games require
more powerful machines and in extreme cases can push even a 750 MHz system
to its limits. Other parts of the emulation, such as the file system, can
easily be faster than an original Amiga when an Amiga partition on the emulation
environment is mapped directly to the host file system. A Pentium Pro or Pentium II
running at 200 MHz feels like an Amiga 3000/030, again with a very responsive file system, and even a faster windowing action. To make
an example of a CPU-intensive task, compiling Personal Paint with SAS/C in UAE emulation
on a Pentium II/400 MHz system takes about as long as on an Amiga 4000/040. By
comparison, the CPU of an Amiga 4000/060 is about 2-3 times faster than an Amiga 4000/040
(the 68060 is roughly twice as fast as a 68040 running at the same clock speed). Intel
systems running at 300 MHz have been tested running some of the most demanding games in
real time, without missing a single frame. At 1 GHz, it can be claimed that
all functions of the original Amiga 1000 computer can be
emulated in real time under the most challenging conditions.
Newer versions of the emulation software include a
"just-in-time" (JIT) compiler, developed by Bernd
Meyer, which, when enabled, can
make the emulation of the CPU on average at least 10 times faster than
without JIT. Benchmarks conducted with Personal Paint (color
reduction and image processing tasks) resulted in speeds more than
30 times faster than without JIT. This means that tasks which used
to take minutes on older versions of the emulation software can
take seconds with JIT. This makes even an old and inexpensive 200
MHz PC faster at running Amiga software than a 68060-based Amiga
(benchmark: SAS/C compiling Personal Paint).
Cloanto publicly benchmarked the Amiga emulation software
included with Amiga Forever 5.0, comparing it
with that of Amiga Forever 4.0 and with third-party packages which were
running on systems kindly made available by attendees, and allowing independent reviewers to study the
tests and measure the times (even on their own computers) at the following events:
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