vifl@hou2f.UUCP (M.MEKETON) (05/23/84)
I received a brochure from The Computer Company on their APL.68000, which is an APL interpreter for Motorola 68000 computers. It runs on LISA's, WICAT's, FORTUNE 32:16's, IBM CS9000's, and a number of other 68000 based micro's. The cost is between $500 and $3000, with the most likely cost of $2000 (cost varies from machine to machine, depending on the number of simultaneous users, etc.). It runs under UNIX, XENIX, CP/M 68K, and a number of other operating systems. In general, it seems to be a very competent APL. The brochure included a table of benchmarks that compared the APL.68000 running under a 8 MHZ 68000 chip with 0 wait states to (among other computers) the IBM PC running STSC's APL*PLUS/PC with no 8087 chip. I felt that an interesting comparision would be to see the performance of APL*PLUS/PC with an 8087 chip, so here goes: ________________________________________________________________________ All times are in milleseconds, the first three columns are a copy of the APL.68000 published benchmark, the fourth column are my timings, with each operation being duplicated 100 times and averaged. Benchmark APL.68000 APL*PLUS/PC APL*PLUS/PC w/o 8087 w/ 8087 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Plus Reduction 12.50 158.73 36.8 Z #is +/VI Logical Reduction 1.24 6.04 9.3 Z #is #or/VL Maximum Reduction 7.19 27.46 39.0 Z #is #maximum/[1]MI Exponentiation 909.99 2476.04 299.3 Z #is VI*.5 Absolute Value 55.62 129.07 74.2 Z #is |VR Indexing 9.37 16.48 33.6 Z #is VR[VI[#count 20]] Sorting 109.06 156.07 127.4 Z #is VI[#downgrade VI] Take 2.50 26.91 33.6 Z #is "2 1 #take MR Membership 121.87 147.75 162.0 Z #is VI #member VI Transposition 94.68 69.75 74.7 Z #is 2 1 #transpose MC Outer Product, (char.) 80.00 134.02 145.6 Z #is VC #outer = VC Outer Product, (int.) 113.43 450.39 446.4 Z #is (#count 50) #outer + #count 50 Inner Product, (real) 113.75 547.07 288.4 Z #is VR #minimum . + VR Matrix Division 288.12 2166.81 209.9 Z #is MR #solve 10 #take VR Fibonacci Series 938.00 3515.23 2487.4 Z #is 1 1 L:#goto (100>#shape Z #is Z,+/"2 #take Z)/L Variables used in the benchmark: MI #is 10 10 #reshape VI #is (500 #reshape 0 1 0 0 1)/#count 500 VL #is 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 MR #is 10 10 #reshape VR #is VI+0.1 MC #is 26 26 #reshape VC #is 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' (I used the keyword form of APL established by STSC in place of the unusual APL symbols) When the operation clearly used the 8087 chip, such as exponentiation and matrix division, the 8087 chip contributed to a reduction by a factor of 10. Some other real number operations were reduced in half. I do not understand why some of my times were actually higher that the w/o 8087 times. More important, this shows that the IBM PC with the 8087 chip, running floating point operations, performs comparably to the 68000 chip which doesn't have hardware floating point support. The 80186 chips, if they are coupled with the 8087 chips (can they be?) would be a forminable contender to the 68000 chip - in terms of speed. As usual, I do not represent any of the companies mentioned. Marc S. Meketon hou2f!vifl
gnu@sun.uucp (John Gilmore) (05/30/84)
Since the non-8087 figures from the posted chart came from printed documentation, it's reasonable to assume that some of them have changed in the intervening year. Have you tried rerunning the benchmarks without your 8087 to see whether the numbers match what TCC claims?