Re: Apple II benchmarks

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

Roy and/or Janet Miller wrote:
 
> Of course, it is a fair test of how well the BASICs on those machines work. The
> article was really comparing the Panasonic machine against the IBM PC, the Apple
> IIe was thrown in for some reason I don't comprehend. Interesting, isn't it,
> that all three BASICs are Micro$oft BASICs: BASICA, GW-BASIC, and Apple$oft
> BASIC. I don't know if the results reflect on the machines or on the BASICs, or
> on both.

Yeah, Microsoft wrote the BASIC interpreter for just about every micro
back then.

The tests hit both the hardware and the BASIC interpreter, and really,
IMHO, show
that the 16-bit BASIC's on the PC were pretty ordinary - they should've
performed
better than that.

Still, surprising result considering the PC is 4.77 times faster in
clock, has 16 bit
arithmetic, and a hardware multiply instruction. Damn that 6502 rocked!

It'd be interesting to run the code for those tests on an accelerated
//e and see what
the numbers came out like. You won't hit 4.77 with an accelerator in a
//e easily, but
using a 4mhz zip chip I wouldn't be surprised if the //e actually came
out on top.

Cheers,

Matt