muller@inmet.UUCP (08/18/84)
#N:inmet:17900029:000:2040 inmet!muller Aug 16 21:13:00 1984 From a:muller Thu Aug 16 15:11:12 1984 *** Question (prompted by a Byte article which reviewed Turbo Pascal for the PC...): The artical was in last month's issue, but it referenced another from Jan, 1983. In that one, Byte listed benchmark times for the Sieve of Eratosthenes for many machines, as reported by their readers. (The Sieve finds the prime numbers from 0 (1) to 8190, and does this 10 times, I believe.) In that Jan, '83 article, there were 2 reportings for Apple Pascal (on a ][ ?), which differed by more than a factor of 2; I tried this with the program given in last month's article and got results that were slower than the slower of those two reportings by a factor of 1.5 or so. So, what explains these differences? (1) Perhaps the other readers were guilty of biasing their results. (2) Perhaps they had Accelerator boards or something, but Byte didn't report it or wasn't told. (3) Perhaps they optimized their programs or their algorithms somehow. (4) Perhaps there are differences between Pascal 1.0 and 1.1 (I tried this with both 1.1 and 1.2 and got identical results). (5) Perhaps there are differences between the ][, the ][+, and the //e (mine). (6) Perhaps this reflects loose tolerances in the 6502's clock speed, and mine is slow. [There was some discussion in Byte about optimizing the program (especially for different languages) or the algorithm, but this strikes me as invalidating the whole concept of benchmark comparisons, a messy business anyway.] Are there any intelligent comments to be made about this? I am curious about the timing differences, and the performance of my machine in particular. I am not inviting discussion of the general topic of benchmarks, but it just seems to me that almost identical machines running the same source code compiled under the same operating system with the same compiler should execute in about the same time...unless everything really isn't the same... Jim Muller ima!inmet!a:muller (?) or harpo!inmet!a:muller (?)