Anyone running Squeak on a SPARClassic? What's it like? I thought I might get one of these machines (for free) but I'm trying to stop my habit of getting machines I won't use.
Also, I was wondering. On my P233 ThinkPad, Morphic is a dog, especially in 2.6. I heard people discussing the high speed of PMacSqueak and the dogginess of IntelSqueak. The 'lassic, being a big-endian machine with tons of registers, is supposed to have an architectural advantage for Squeak over the Intels, but is this enough to make Morphic fast at low clock rates?
What do you think?
-- "In any event, once Robert Craft forged the Stravinsky-Schoenberg axis in the 1950s and the eclecticism of the 1960s alleviated the austere serialism of the previous decade, the futures market in Hindemithian repose was struck by panic selling." -Glenn Gould
One change in 2.6 that might be making Morphic look like a dog on your P233 is that dragging an entire window and its contents is now "standard" behavior. You might find Morphic much less doggy if you set "fastDragWindowForMorphic" in Preferences to true, so only the window outline is used. (Dragging whole windows is not quite satisfactory to me even on a P2/400.)
-- Dwight
John Duncan wrote:
Anyone running Squeak on a SPARClassic? What's it like? I thought I might get one of these machines (for free) but I'm trying to stop my habit of getting machines I won't use.
Also, I was wondering. On my P233 ThinkPad, Morphic is a dog, especially in 2.6. I heard people discussing the high speed of PMacSqueak and the dogginess of IntelSqueak. The 'lassic, being a big-endian machine with tons of registers, is supposed to have an architectural advantage for Squeak over the Intels, but is this enough to make Morphic fast at low clock rates?
What do you think?
One change in 2.6 that might be making Morphic look like a dog on your P233 is that dragging an entire window and its contents is now "standard" behavior. You might find Morphic much less doggy if you set "fastDragWindowForMorphic" in Preferences to true, so only the window outline is used. (Dragging whole windows is not quite satisfactory to me even on a P2/400.)
My apologies -- I did change this preference, and I will change it back in the future until Squeak gets a bit faster. With Ian at work on Jitter again, and Andreas messing around in BitBlt, I have hopes...
- Dan
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On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, John Duncan wrote:
Also, I was wondering. On my P233 ThinkPad, Morphic is a dog, especially in 2.6. I heard people discussing the high speed of PMacSqueak and the dogginess of IntelSqueak. The 'lassic, being a big-endian machine with tons of registers, is supposed to have an architectural advantage for Squeak over the Intels, but is this enough to make Morphic fast at low clock rates?
Often, if Morphic "feels" slow, the kind of graphics card you have or your screen depth setting will matter as much or more than the type of CPU. The benchmarks that come with Squeak measure message send and bytecode speed, so they won't help you with figuring out graphics card/screen depth issues.
So, I whipped up a simple benchmark which attempts to measure graphics performance in Squeak. (See the bottom of this message. Run "Morph simpleGraphicsBenchmark".)
It's fairly brain-dead... it just opens a workspace at a fixed size, and scrolls a bunch of text up and down 20 times. (It does temporarily disable inboard scrollbars, which can be a factor.) The results seem fairly consistent. Having a much larger or smaller default font makes a slight difference in the outcome (though not much), so it's best to run this with the default font settings.
The benchmark mostly exercises the DisplayScreen primitive, plus some character scanning code.
Fancier benchmarks ("speed tests" might be a better term) could probably be created which measure the performance of common Morphic operations such as resizing windows (in non-fastDrag mode)...
Here are some results from some tests I ran. (I ran 2 tests per screen depth combination.) Mostly, you just want to pay attention to the values where Squeak's screen depth matches the host OS's screen depth, although the other values can be interesting. (e.g., on the NT box, you pay a huge penalty if the two don't match, but it's not as big on deal on the other platforms.)
Anyway, I find Morphic very usable at a value of 1000, reasonably usable at around 3000, and pretty tough to use above 7000 or so.
- Doug Way EAI/Transom Technogies, Ann Arbor, MI dway@eai.com, dway@mat.net http://www.transom.com
266 MHz Apple iMac: 8-bit Sqk: 16-bit Sqk: 32-bit Sqk: Host OS = 8-bit: 1512 1510 2287 2282 3123 3138 Host OS = 16-bit: 2321 2330 2023 2027 3165 3149 Host OS = 24-bit: 3049 3024 2959 2978 3075 3044
300 MHz Apple iBook: 8-bit Sqk: 16-bit Sqk: 32-bit Sqk: Host OS = 8-bit: 1226 1223 2033 2022 2870 2883 Host OS = 16-bit: 2247 2249 1621 1616 2752 2721 Host OS = 24-bit: 3431 3425 1983 1979 2586 2542
300 MHz VAResearch Pentium II, Windows NT, ATI 3D RAGE IIC AGP card 8-bit Sqk: 16-bit Sqk: 32-bit Sqk: Host OS = 8-bit: 951 941 5257 5258 5548 5538 Host OS = 16-bit: 931 931 1282 1272 3395 3375 Host OS = 24-bit: 991 982 1682 1672 3315 3355 Host OS = "True Color": 1101 1112 1552 1553 1632 1612
180 MHz Toshiba Pentium I laptop, Windows 95, Chips & Tech. 65554 PCI board 8-bit Sqk: 16-bit Sqk: 32-bit Sqk: Host OS = 8-bit: 6829 6762 8574 8924 11489 11521 Host OS = 16-bit: 7432 7441 9282 9265 11523 11428 Host OS = 24-bit: 8162 8128 10184 10143 14288 14305
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0,664,2,1628,26,
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