Re: Accelerator //e

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates) wrote:

><pubpc@library.ucla.edu> (Scott G.) wrote:
>>True, but try using your graphical word processor or page
>>layout software and see which one is faster.  Why are you
>>so offended when I say _my_ accelerated GS is faster than
>>_my_ 486SLC for tasks like word processing?  I am just
>>reporting what I see.  That's no offense to your Pentium.
>
>   You're comparing one big bloated GUI program on the PC side (and
>laptops have historically have always had worse video thruput than the
>average desktop of the same era, another fact you conveniently ignore)
>to something written mostly in asm on the GS side. For a more
>realistic benchmark, try something that's very processor intensive on
>both sides, and *not* written in asm: a compiler.

I agree with Nathan that hardware wise, that PC is probably quite a
bit faster than that 65816 in the Zip.  Like I observed before several
times in this thread, the 65816 is most like a 286.  Like someone
else said, an 8Mhz 65816 is best equivalent to a 25Mhz 286, and
this agrees with my tests.

I don't think Scott is claiming that the 65816 is faster than a 486
chip, though.  It is precisely because PC programs are so bloated
that he sees what he sees above.  Like someone else said, modern
programmers no longer write fast programs -- they write slow
programs and wait for the hardware to get faster.  If I had to run
the bloated Win95 programs that I see on a PC as low power as
that 486SLC, hell I'd prefer to use an accelerated GS too (and I
still prefer to use AW Classic on the GS and Wordperfect DOS
on the PC to snub those bloatware programs)!