Re: Apple 2 benchmark?

[Warren Ernst <wernst@gmail.com>]

On Sep 3, 11:56 pm, mdj <mdj....@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sep 4, 11:37 am, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Or, you could do what may be the best test:  running a couple
> > of real applications that have some relevance and measuring the
> > speedup on those--an Appleworks sort or text search would be one
> > possibility.  I'd use one of my programs that runs long enough
> > that I have to wait for it to finish...
>
> > The problem, of course, is broad comparability and verifiability.
>
> > If you run a popular benchmark, it makes it easier to compare Apples
> > to "oranges", but at the cost of realism.  If you run a real application
> > that is meaningful and "real", the results can only be compared for the
> > machines and configurations that you, yourself, measure.
>
> > Computer performance measurement is a many splendored thing, and it
> > steadfastly refuses to be characterized by a single number--even for
> > our relatively simple older machines.
>
> I completely agree that a measurement of actual speedup in
> applications you actually use is the best measure of any performance
> improving hardware addition.
>
> I would add though that in my experience, the most representative
> synthetic benchmark (for the given case of same machine architecture,
> different clock/cache configuration) is memory bandwidth.
>
> In the case of the Apple II, I think it's fairly safe to assume that
> compute-heavy tasks will show a speedup proportional to clock rate;
> it's not like we have to deal with ISA compatible chips with wildly
> different pipeline depth, branch prediction and cache behavior like is
> common in the Intel/AMD world.
>
> Yourself and I conducted a very informal (and contrived) test a while
> back (posts archived on google groups) that showed a very large
> difference between memory write bandwidth between aTranswarpI and aZIPthat was completely disproportionate to clock speed.
>
> Subjectively speaking, aTranswarpI and a 4MhzZIPfeel pretty
> similar when doing some tasks (ie full screen editing inMerlin).
> Assembling a large program however shows a marked difference between
> the two.
>
> It's been my general experience with other systems too, that with the
> exception of specialised mathematics processing (like say video
> compression/conversion) where a sophisticated floating point unit can
> easily outperform a lesser one at equivalent clock speed, that the
> machine with the better memory bandwidth generally outperformed the
> lesser.
>
> Matt

Any help in finding that post? A few minutes of googling later and I
can't find anything like that.

Thanks,
Warr