CompuServe Messages

Nope… because your 21 MIPS machine was specified at 21 MIPS based on the number of single byte adds if could do in a second, and mine was specified at 18 MIPS based on using all instructions, most of which take a lot longer than a single byte ADD. In actual fact, my machine is twice as fast as yours, because it can do all the common instructions in less clock cycles, and it has some fast instructions that do a lot more in reasonably fast time, that yours can only do by writing a routine that uses many more instructions. Here's some food for thought. A friend of mine used to do a lot of work with the Commodore PET. I dropped into his officce/shop one day, and he was showing me a new BASIC that he was writing. It was a business oriented BASIC, and had some neat features. I asked him how fast it was, and he pointed to the keyboard and told me to try something. Well, I just happened to know how long a 'FOR I=1 TO 1000; NEXT' took to execute on a standard PET, with its built-in Microsoft BASIC. I also knew how long it took on a TRS-80, Atari, and Apple. So, I typed it in. The 'READY' prompt returned virtually immediately. I was VERY impresed! He could not keep a straight face. _EVERYONE_ who ever wanted to find out how fast a BASIC was, would type that line, so all he did was to detect a FOR loop with nothing in it, set the variable to its terminating value, and carry on to the next instruction. Was it a measure of speed? Of course not. Same with MIPS. -larry