Re: Apple II benchmarks

[Paul Guertin <pg@sff.net>]

Matt Jenkins <mdj@pacific.net.au> wrote:

> > "Roy and/or Janet Miller" <millers@inetnebr.com> wrote in message
> > 3933FF70.BD9334D4@inetnebr.com">news:3933FF70.BD9334D4@inetnebr.com...
> > > Calculations in BASIC
> > >     A2 - 94 secs  PC - 69 secs
> > > Spreadsheet recalc
> > >     A2 - 22 secs  PC - 11 secs.
> > >
> > > the Calculations was 10,000 multiply and divide operations, the
> > > spreadsheet was recalculating a 25 by 25 cell sheet with each cell 1.001
> > > times larger than the cell to its left.
> 
> The really surprising thing is that the Intel chips have hardware
> multiply, so those machines should have eaten the IIe for breakfast,
> but they didn't.

Are you sure that the "calculations" test involved integer multiply and
divide? The 8088 doesn't do floating-point operations in hardware.
Besides, I seem to remember that the hardware multiply on the 8088 was
very slow -- you could actually write a software multiply with 512 bytes
of tables that was faster than the built-in one.

Paul Guertin
pg@sff.net