kimbrennan@gnh-starport.cts.com (Kim Brennan) (12/21/90)
Ryan, many years ago one of the writers in BYTE magazine did a bench mark series comparing the speed of a Apple //e against the IBM PC (not XT). His findings were that the Apple //e was about 1% faster. Not enough to make a difference to anybody. Remember though, that that was an 8088 against an 65C02. In almost every generation of Intel chips since then the capabilities of the chips have increased and NOT by just the clock speed. There are some fanatical Apple // people who seem to remember that original benchmark and extrapolate it to mean that a 2.8MHz GS is equivalent to a 12Mhz 286. It just isn so. The 65816 unfortunately doesn't do 16bit data transfers...all at once that is. The 286 has a 16bit bus and CAN do 16 bit data transfers that way. SO it is somewhat faster than the 65816. The 386 and the 486 speed up operations even MORE so by increasing speed of operations EVEN at the same clock as the 286.
ericmcg@pnet91.cts.com (Eric Mcgillicuddy) (12/23/90)
>The 386 and the 486 speed up operations even MORE so by increasing speed of >operations EVEN at the same clock as the 286. Actually the '386 executes some instructions slower than a '286. Only the '486 really improves the execution times any. Running existing applications on a 65816 and a '286 both at the same clock rate gives about the same performance. However you may be hard pressed to find a 286 system that runs at the same clock rate as a fast '816, you might have to get a real IBM system. This is based on a quick perusal of Leventhal's books on the respective chips. Personally I don't care one way or the other, the GS does what I want it to do and it does it quickly enough for me. If it doesn't then accelerators are available that make it plenty fast. UUCP: bkj386!pnet91!ericmcg INET: ericmcg@pnet91.cts.com
kimbrennan@gnh-starport.cts.com (Kim Brennan) (12/27/90)
Personally, I >TOO< find that the GS does all that I need it too ( and very well thank you). At Christmas I had a chance to play on my sister-in-law's new Mac IIsi. I did admire the crisp screen (though I felt the characters to be a bit small) and liked their being more pixels on the screen than on the GS, BUT, I also felt that this Mac IIsi was no faster than my (Transwarped 6.25MHz) GS. I copied Ready Set Go onto the internal floppy and played with it some, and realized how much like Appleworks GS Page Layout it was. I'll stick with my GS, HP Laserjet IIp (w/Postscript), 6.25Megs of Memory, 195Megs of Hard disk, Quickie, PC Transporter, Stereo, and expanded keyboard!