Re: Apple II benchmarks

[Matt Jenkins <mdj@pacific.net.au>]

John King wrote:
> 
> FWIW regarding speed, I was pretty underwhelmed at the speed differences
> between a Tandy 1000a (4.7 8088), and a Model One @ 2.4 MHz.
> 
> "Roy and/or Janet Miller" <millers@inetnebr.com> wrote in message
> 3933FF70.BD9334D4@inetnebr.com">news:3933FF70.BD9334D4@inetnebr.com...
> > I was reading an old Byte last night, and article comparing an 8086-2
> > based clone against an IBM PC and an Apple IIe running ProDOS. Some
> > interesting comparisons:
> >  Disk read/write in BASIC
> >     A2 - 36/37  PC - 46/56
> > Sieve test in BASIC
> >     A2 - 245 secs  PC- 191 secs
> > Calculations in BASIC
> >     A2 - 94 secs  PC - 69 secs
> > Spreadsheet recalc
> >     A2 - 22 secs  PC - 11 secs.
> >
> > Not too bad, pitting a 1 mhz 6502 against a 4.77 8088. Oh, on the last
> > one, how did the 8086 do? at 4.77 exactly the same as the PC. By the
> > way, 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. And my IIc+ is about 3.5 times
> > faster than the IIe.

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.
I conducted tests like that years ago trying to prove to a XT equipped
friend
that clock speed isn't everything. Needless to say, a IIe with a
transwarp card
fitted (or any other accelerator) embarrases 4.77 Mhz PC's.

That said, I don't think the tests in BASIC are very fair, since it's
benchmarking
the BASIC interpreter as well as the hardware. Ultimately, such tests
need to be
hand tuned assembly to show which machine is actually faster.