C70:info-cpm (05/18/82)
>From W8SDZ@Mit-Mc Tue May 18 01:17:10 1982
Date: 17 May 82 14:26:59-PDT (Mon)
From: decvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uicsovax!kline at Berkeley
To: info-micro at mit-ai
Re: IBM PC Benchmark - (nf)
Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.129
Via: news.usenet; 17 May 82 19:10-PDT
#R:duke:-212900:uicsovax:3700002:000:742
uicsovax!kline May 14 11:14:00 1982
Even if the 8088 is taking advantage of the 16-bit architecture,
It will be slowed by the fact that it only has an 8-bit external bus.
Even with the 16-bit registers, floating point single precision
values are represented by 32 or more bits, causing memory references
through the just-as-slow-as-an-8080 8-bit bus.
I would suspect that the 16-bit register advantage of the 8088 will
manifest itself in integer arithmetic; where (in Microsoft BASIC anyway)
integers are represented with 16-bit values, and thus the 8088 can keep
the entire operands in itself while operating on them, cutting down
on memory references and eliminating the bottleneck on the bus. I haven't,
however, been able to get at an IBM PC to test out this theory.