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From: dgary@ecsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: PC AT 80287 no faster than 8087
Message-ID: <3179@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 30-Aug-84 20:59:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.3179
Posted: Thu Aug 30 20:59:07 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 3-Sep-84 11:02:28 EDT
Lines: 18

<>
A surprising fact surfaced at an IBM PC AT demo the other day:
While programs generally run 3x as fast on the PC AT as on the
PC, programs making heavy use of the floating point chip (8087 on
the PC, 80287 on the PC AT) seem to run at the same speed.  For
example, inverting a 30x30 matrix in IBM's APL took about 10
seconds on both machines.  This was confirmed by tests of at least
two programs (the APL interpreter and an program written in (I think
it was) assembler.  Very curious.  My suspicion is that the 8087 and
the 80287 run at about the same speed, and that most of the
time being eaten up in these tests was floating point crunching.
I'm still surprised the faster and wider memory access didn't
speed things up!

D Gary Grady
Duke University Computation Center, Durham, NC  27706
(919) 684-4146
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