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Color Classic speed

OleLila

Well-known member
I had increased the memory on my color classic today to 8 MB hoping for a speed bump. It's running System 7.1.1 and 32 bit addressing is on, on reading System 7.1.1 has 32 bit quickdraw built in. Abuse and Prince of Persia 2 are not playable secondary to the lag. I thought at least POP would run, is this everyone experience?

 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
Adding more memory to an older computer which isn't using virtual memory won't give you a speedup in the same way as it would for a machine with VM.  More memory only makes thing faster if it would allow things to hit memory that would otherwise hit slower devices (e.g. disc cache, disc-backed virtual memory)

 

Byrd

Well-known member
Hi OleLila,

Abuse and POP2 I'd consider to be playable on '040 Macs, no way 16Mhz '030 is going to cut it unfortunately for these games.  POP1 on the other hand ... :)

JB

 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
isn't the color classic limited also by having a 16bit data bus?? I may be wrong on that though?


It sure is, and it makes it painfully slow compared to other 68030 Macs, and even more painful compared to a 68040.

If you want an exercise in patience, boot up an LC/LCII and wait for things to happen.  Use the menus.  The original Color Classic is really no different than the LC/LCII.  And the LCII had basically zero speed bump over an LC (except it could use virtual memory, which really would make it slower).

It's a shame that Apple crippled such great machines with a 16 bit bus.  The Classic II could have been a real SE/30 competitor had it kept the 32bit bus of the SE/30, or used the LCIII style design instead.

 

OleLila

Well-known member
Wow...its interesting, I even owned an LC way back when and I do not remember it being this slow, maybe just happy to have color at that point.....

 

beachycove

Well-known member
It is a different machine altogether with an LC 520, LC550 (Color Classic II) or LC575 (Color Classic Mystic) board inside. Unfortunately, a stock Color Classic  is almost unusable. Basically, the only thing the original logic board really is good for is troubleshooting the hard drive with utilities that expect the thing to be stock.

As has been said, it is hard to understand why Apple manufactured and marketed such crap. There were alternatives, and they weren’t that much more expensive to make and sell.

 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
As has been said, it is hard to understand why Apple manufactured and marketed such crap. There were alternatives, and they weren’t that much more expensive to make and sell.


Apple made very deliberate engineering decisions to hobble low end and mid-market Macs from cannibalizing sales of the next higher tier. I always thought they should work harder at pushing high end system performance. Adjusted for inflation, the IIfx was probably the most expensive Mac ever released. Shipping it with but 32K of L2 and no attempt to develop/implement L3 Cache in a $10,000 workstation class machine was inexcusable IMO.

The CC fit Apple's tiered marketing model like a glove. What was inexcusable form my point of view was releasing it without the stereo speakers of its macrocephalic stable mates. Then again, it wasn't designed to play CDs. Adding an external CD and speakers pretty much defeats the intention to fit it into the Compact Mac territory, color or not.

 

joshc

Well-known member
If you want an exercise in patience, boot up an LC/LCII and wait for things to happen.
Is the same true if you use 6.0.8L on those systems instead though? I know that's not an option for a Color Classic but for the LC and LC II I believe System 6 should be a lot quicker.

 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
Is the same true if you use 6.0.8L on those systems instead though? I know that's not an option for a Color Classic but for the LC and LC II I believe System 6 should be a lot quicker.
Only the OS is quicker. It doesn’t change the fact that the 32 bit processor is accessing ram with a 16 bit bus. Meaning it’s very crippled. 

 

joshc

Well-known member
Only the OS is quicker. It doesn’t change the fact that the 32 bit processor is accessing ram with a 16 bit bus. Meaning it’s very crippled. 
True, my point was mostly about addressing the issue of slow responsiveness in menus etc which the OS should help with, System 6 also boots very fast (even from floppy) whereas System 7 does not. But yes let's just say that the LC/LC II/Color Classic cater very well for the user seeking a leisurely computing experience. :lol:

 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
True, my point was mostly about addressing the issue of slow responsiveness in menus etc which the OS should help with, System 6 also boots very fast (even from floppy) whereas System 7 does not. But yes let's just say that the LC/LC II/Color Classic cater very well for the user seeking a leisurely computing experience. :lol:
To be honest, most vintage collectors owning one of these “prized” machines that are also painfully slow to use, should also own another Mac that runs really fast for anything they want to do other than the novelty of using one of these original pieces. 
 

A good use case is a simple System folder with minimal boot items, and something like an Apple IIe card. Running the IIe card on one of these is actually quite ideal. 24 bit memory addressing is required which suits the limit on these very nicely. It’s almost a shame to put a IIe card inside something like a 475/575 Mac. 

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
I wrote up something much longer than this, then deleted it because I think the point got lost in the details.

As with the Macintosh 6200 family, I think that these systems often get mis-judged. We often end up comparing them to systems that cost a lot more and had different form factors and ultimately different market segments.

By 1993, you could get a Color Classic for $1,200 or so, often with a copy of ClarisWorks. That was several hundred dollars short of any other Mac. A 605 was $980 but you'd need a $320 monitor and an $80 keyboard, absolute minimum, to boot it to a usable state, and the $320 monitor was inferior to the Color Classic's display. (Well, it's a bit of a wash, it was a shadow mask 640x480 display.) (This is all Apple's own US pricing from their mail order catalog.)

I've got the CC's monochromatic sibling, the Classic II, and, sure, it's not as fast as my 840, but, to be honest the 840av isn't fast either. I use it because I like the form factor, and I think that it's important to consider what regular people might have had access to -- because, well, an 840av wasn't really a reasonable purchase for a home user at the time. Once an application is launched, it basically runs fine. To be honest, even AppleWorks 5 and Claris Organizer 2 from 1996 and 1999 respectively run fine on the CII, even when it's connected to an AppleShare server over LocalTalk.

Adjusted for inflation, the IIfx was probably the most expensive Mac ever released. Shipping it with but 32K of L2 and no attempt to develop/implement L3 Cache in a $10,000 workstation class machine was inexcusable IMO.


Level 3 caches didn't exist until 1995 in DEC Alpha 21164 machines, probably only the big ones that would sell for minimum $30,000 or so. It didn't re-appear again basically at all anywhere else at all until 2001-2002 when it appeared in some POWER4s and in the PowerPC G4, where it was used to compensate for the fact that the Mac G4 had a system bus and memory half to a sixth as fast as what you could get in a Pentium 4.

Apple used a lot of go-fast tricks on its very highest end systems. I don't think it's inexcusable per se that they didn't happen to stumble upon this one, and, I think it's important to consider what pricing would have looked like on a Mac that did, especially in 1989.

The important thing to remember is that as part of its 1990s ethos of trying to be literally everything to everybody, they absolutely had to be selling "cheap" Macs. It's tough to say whether each choice they made was as an attempt to specifically sabotage low end machines, or as an active attempt to keep costs down.

Given that 1987-1997 Apple is such a favorite era, I would presume to use the generous possibility here and say that it was an attempt to keep the machines reasonably priced.

A lot of the intent of Apple's lowest price computers, and I think it would be fair to read this intent into almost anything Apple has sold at a low price, is to force the technology to exist at a price more people can afford. A $999 Classic in 1990 was favorable to the alternative of "not having a computer" -- a $1200 Color Classic in 1993 is favorable to the alternative of "not having a computer" -- so on and so-forth.

Apple stopped (for a while at least) differentiating between "pro" and "consumer" systems on the performance front in 1998 with the release of the iMac, and, that next couple years were a revelation in what could be done between the fact that costs for all tech had fallen so much over the course of a decade and with a simplified product lineup.(1) I question whether or not that would have been feasible prior to then. Even on the PC side of things, you had budget-oriented machines selling with years-old components and platforms that made compromises to achieve a cost objective. The PC-market equivalents to the Classic and LC families did all the exact same things, beat-for-beat.

(1) sidenote w/re that: they started differentiating in compute guts again almost the literal instant they had something worth giving to pros, with the G4 and then the G5, but still.

 

macdoogie

Well-known member
Adjusted for inflation, the IIfx was probably the most expensive Mac ever released. Shipping it with but 32K of L2 and no attempt to develop/implement L3 Cache in a $10,000 workstation class machine was inexcusable IMO.


Level 3 caches didn't exist until 1995 in DEC Alpha 21164 machines, probably only the big ones that would sell for minimum $30,000 or so. It didn't re-appear again basically at all anywhere else at all until 2001-2002 when it appeared in some POWER4s and in the PowerPC G4, where it was used to compensate for the fact that the Mac G4 had a system bus and memory half to a sixth as fast as what you could get in a Pentium 4.

Apple used a lot of go-fast tricks on its very highest end systems. I don't think it's inexcusable per se that they didn't happen to stumble upon this one, and, I think it's important to consider what pricing would have looked like on a Mac that did, especially in 1989.
Just to clarify the above points. The size and number of levels of caching are fundamentally a property of the processor architecture. The MC68030 simply did not have an interface, nor the logic to implement an L3 cache, nor did the 68040, which more or less simply integrated of the 68030 extras like cache and the FPU onto the processor die. Also, it may not have made much sense in that era(sub 100Mhz) as the disparity between processor data bandwidth and memory bandwidth was more on par. The topology of DRAM main memory to one level of SRAM cache to the CPU was the right cost/performance tradeoff for that generation. Caching makes more sense when your CPU core becomes many times faster(total bandwidth, not just clock speed) than your memory subsystem. All things that were beyond Apple's control design-wise. Also, I believe the cache on the 68030 was already external, so there's little benefit to adding another layer to the memory subsystem when it's constrained by the board layout limitations. For cache to be effective it needs to be fast(like SRAM), wide(at least matching the CPUs internal data path width - easier to do at chip scale than board scale), and close to the processor(and usually on it's own bus - hence the "backside" L3 cache of the G4 series).

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
To that point, L3 isn't even always a good or a preferable solution. More/faster L2 or even L1 is absolutely better, and, today Apple does control the architecture of its processors and (so far as we know/I've seen) they don't use any L3, in favor of a really big on-die L2.

That Apple (and/or Motorola) chose to use L3 for the G3s points to either Apple looking to balance cost and performance or Motorola not having a real way to make the memory keep up with every other extant platform at that time, so having it in that context was better than not having it, but not having needed it would have been even better.

For the past couple of years, Intel has cautiously dipped their toes into processors that have a defacto fourth level of cache, on-die eDRAM in varying sizes (so far up to 128 megs), mostly on systems that have Intel Iris Pro graphics, so, there's a bunch of 2013+ iMacs and MacBook Pro models that have it, I believe the top end 13-inch Intel MBP today is among them, one of the iMacs someone on my team has it, it mostly gets used as a fast graphics memory location, but chips that could do it were technically released and are available for Z97 motherboards, and there are some Xeon platforms that have it, so it is possible to get a system with an eDRAM cache that isn't using it for graphics, but I don't know off hand if the impact of this is well studied. I might poke at that for some reading, that might be something fun to see if you can still get and if it makes any difference.

 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
I couldn't find a introduction date for L3, so it's 1995? Feeling it might have been later on, I said they should have tried to develop it. [;)]

One way to look at it might be that Apple was forced to lame 32bit processors with a 16bit data bus for low cost systems. Moto provided no equivalent of the pre-lamed, low cost machine oriented 386SX CPU with its 16bit bus and 16MB memory limit. Ya gotta do what you gotta do sometimes, but Apple could have at least matched the LC's architecture more fairly up against a 386SX garage level Clone.

 

Solvalou

Well-known member
I was so unimpressed with the speed of the LC under any kind of System 7 OS to the point that I downgraded it to 6.0.8. I found the LCII could cope with System 7.1 to a decent standard though, but I wouldn't go any higher than that on a standard CC.

As others have said, the CC is a very slow 030 machine. The SE/30 over 3½ years before the CC would run rings around it, even in the same B&W colour setting. 

You can always drop in a LC575 board into it though like mine. Then you can play Doom (albeit in low graphics and in postage stamp screen size)! The other limiting factor is it's odd asepct ratio of 512x384, it really needs to be modded to 640x480 for a lot of software to play ball.

 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
The SE/30 over 3½ years before the CC would run rings around it, even in the same B&W colour setting. 


At introduction, the SE/30 was also nearly five times the price of the CC, so, I mean, it really ought to.  Comparing low-end and high-end machines is not really fair.  The LC II and the CC, while yes, they have some odd and unhelpful design decisions, were what low-end computing was like at the time.

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
but Apple could have at least matched the LC's architecture more fairly up against a 386SX garage level Clone.


They did! The 386SX garbage clones were basically faster 286es. They supported almost no memory (usually 8 megs max) and they did, I'm pretty sure, almost the exact same "32-bit CPU on a 16-bit bus" kind of thing.

In 1994-5 the PC vendors were also doing the same thing as the Apple, installing Pentium OverDrives on 486 platforms. And in 1990, the PC vendors were doing the same thing as Apple was at the low end, reheating 8086 and 8088 as budget-oriented machines even as really fast 386 and really-really fast 486es were launching.

EDIT for clarity: Here's Wikipedia explaining that the 386sx is a 386 but with a 16-bit data bus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80386#80386SX

I said they should have tried to develop it. [;)]


But, to the point macdoogie made - Apple didn't really control the platform at that level at that time, and, the Level 2 cache was already external anyway, which is further away than Level 3 caches were typically in the 2000s and certainly further away than they are now. (*They're all on-die now.)

It might have helped to make the L2 cache bigger, but, Apple couldn't have done anything about an L1 and L3 is just... "the RAM" in this scenario. Maybe faster RAM? but the machine was already $8,600 minimum before a keyboard, graphics card, monitor, any application software at all, and a hard disk.

The SE/30 over 3½ years before the CC would run rings around it, even in the same B&W colour setting. 


To agree with cheesestrings here, this is huge "2017 18-core iMac Pro with 16 gigs of video memory and 128 gigs of system memory is faster than a 2019 dual core ULV iMac with 8 gigs of RAM and a hard disk" energy right here.

The CC wasn't really a replacement for the SE/30, it was a smaller and more affordable LC 520 aimed at basic productivity rather than multimedia.

The SE/30... well, I don't know that I've ever seen a satisfactory explanation for what the SE/30 was for other than an imagined situation where somebody needed a lot of horsepower but didn't need a lot of expansion and didn't need a lot of display space. Almost everything an SE/30 can do, a IIcx can do better.

To get an SE/30 for the kinds of thigns that Classic-family machines were meant for when it was new would've been ludicrous. Like getting an iMac Pro or a high end 27-inch iMac today to pay your taxes and browse facebook. That's what the Plus (and to a lesser extent SE) was arguably for, and, the Plus ultimately got replaced by the Classic got replaced by the CII/CC.

 
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