Re: Applesoft I and II and floating-point performance

[bctimes@hotmail.com (Forrest)]

Somewhere, pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:
> Applesoft II also kept
>the floating-point performance of Applesoft I, which appears to have
>been less lousy: the only Applesoft patches I've seen which attempted
>to speed up the floating-point performance used coprocessors of one
>kind or another.  I tested one myself, which used the ALF 8088
>coprocessor card: using this card + the accompanying patch would
>speed up the floating-point in Applesoft by a factor of about 3 to 5.

Poking around I found this:

http://people.delphi.com/paulrsm/68k/dg/dg12.htm

which contains some comments regarding the ALF 8088 by some people
behind 68000 based boards of the same function.

The interesting bit is how impressive the numbers aren't.

The idea is to optimize performance by using Microsoft TASC
to wipe out the Applesoft interpretive overhead, and then
patch out the calls to the Applesoft FP routines.  And yes,
everything beats the Applesoft version by as much as a factor of 6
(or even 50* when they substitute their own custom language).

Thing is, they're comparing the 1 MHz Apple to systems running
considerably faster.  Is it impressive to beat the II by a factor of
6 when running at 8 or 12 times the clock rate?  Especially when
using a processor that should be _more_ powerful, cycle for cycle, 
proportionately speaking?

Looks to me people would've been better off with accelerator boards.

(* Slow their 68000 to 1 MHz and it's more like 4.  I think
we're in the realm of potential optimization here.)