Re: Apple II benchmarks

[Roy and/or Janet Miller <millers@inetnebr.com>]

Paul Schlyter wrote:

> >> and it still had an 8-bit external bus.  I remember
> >> quite well how my 6 MHz Z80 card in the Apple II often outperformed
> >> the 4.77 MHz PC, except on floating-point intensive code, where the
> >> 8087 in the PC did give a speed advantage the Apple II was unable to
> >> catch up on.
> >
> > Of course that isn't a comparison between an Apple II and a PC, but
> > between the CP/M computer in the Apple and the PC.
>
> Sorry, but it was still an Apple II: it used the Apple II's bus and
> memory, and *all* I/O operations were done using the 6502.

With a coprocessor board inside Paul, you really aren't using the same
platform, whether it's my PCPI 6 mhz Z-80 with it's own 64K in my Apple II, or
a PC Transporter or my Trackstar 128 card by Diamond (an Apple II clone card)
in an IBM PC or clone. Different CPU, different clock speed, different
operating system, different memory map - in short, a different computer
occasionally using some or all of the resources of the host computer. By your
reasoning above, I could do the same tests that Byte did, using my Trackstart
(1 mhz 65C02, 128K, ProDOS, using either a Microsoft clone of AppleSoft or FP
BASIC if I booted from a true Apple disk), and claim that it's results were a
PCs results because I have it mounted in an IBM PC-XT.

> No standard
> CP/M disk format could be read -- all CP/M disks had to be in Apple II
> disk format.

Paul, there was no standard CP/M disk format, unless you count the IBM SS/SD
8" standard. And my Kaypro 2x can't use that. Not with out some additional
nonstandard hardware. Neither could an Osborne or a TRS-80 Model 4 or a
Morrow, or a Compupro, and for that matter, without some really neat utility
software, those five machines couldn't read each other's 5.25" formats - one
of the reasons that MS-DOS beat out CP/M as the standard for business and
professional microcomputing operating system. One of the interesting things
about my Coleco ADAM is that it's CP/M disks are in the MS-DOS SS/DD 8 sector
standard - IBM's original format. I was able to start a boot on my IBM clone
with my ADAM CP/M disk, it would crash, but it actually started to boot!
Weird!

>
> > But take an Apple II that had a numeric coprocessor board installed
> > (and there were such available) and it might have blown the doors off
> > the Intel 8087 equipped machine too.
>
> Sorry, but the Apple II didn't "blow the door off" the 4.77 MHz PC
> without coprocessor -- rather it was able to sometimes keep up with
> the PC.

If you were to read my above statement in the context of the previous
statements, we are talking about two computers, one running nearly five times
faster by the clock, and only twice as fast in some real world floating point
math. Let's face it, if an 8/16/20 bit CPU running at 4.77 mhz is only twice
as fast at FP work in, as you suggested, an assembly language spreadsheet as
an 8/8/16 bit CPU running at 1 mhz, and the former is based on a calculator
chip design, well, that's pitiful. That's like someone in a 8 cylinder, 350 ci
dual carb street rod beating my 4 cylinder 1600 cc  `71 VW bus in a drag race
by a hundred yards or so. In other words, pitiful...  :-)

> I found it interesting that the spreadsheet test was floating point

> > math, and the Apple at one fifth the clock speed was crunching numbers
> > in only twice the time of the PC.  I wonder what spreadsheet was used?
> > Multiplan?
>
> If it was an early spreadsheet, it may have been written in assembly
> language which had been machine translated from 8080 assembly to
> 8086/8088 assembly.  Such programs were quite common in the early PC
> days: while it allowed a quick migration of software from CP/M to the
> PC, performance did indeed suffer.
>

The reason I suggested Multiplan is it is one of two spreadsheet programs that
I know worked on several platforms in 1985. TI 99/4a, C-64, Apple II, PC-DOS,
Mac, who knows how many others. The other spreadsheet was SuperCalc; if memory
serves it worked on CP/M, PC-DOS, and Apple II (ProDOS?).

Roy