lam@tiger.Princeton.EDU (Harvey Lam) (12/06/86)
Summary:Macintosh can compute faster than IBM AT with Math chip. Expires: References: <852@aicchi.UUCP> Sender: Reply-To: lam@tiger.princeton.edu.UUCP (Harvey Lam) Followup-To: Distribution: usa Organization: EE Department, Princeton University Keywords: number crunching MacFORTH In Macforth (or Macforth Plus), there is a "Math Toolkit" which does floating point number crunching and is an alternative to SANE. It is extremely fast. For example, it is faster than integer arithematics in some calculations (in Macforth). To sum the reciprocal of 1 to 10001, MS Basic double precision (on a Mac) takes 68 seconds, single precision takes 22 seconds, TRUE BASIC (on a Mac) takes 7 seconds, Macforth scaled integer takes 4.6, and the Math Toolkit and Macforth (in floating point) takes 3.6 seconds. On an IBM AT with Turbo Pascal 3.0, 9 seconds without the math chip, and 4.0 seconds with 80287 math chip. It seems incredible, but it is true! Math Toolkit is from Mosaic Industries of Mountain View.