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From: DEC.BANKS@MARLBORO.DEC.COM
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: ST vs Amiga, and please quit this silly ranting
Message-ID: <852@caip.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Fri, 27-Dec-85 11:32:56 EST
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Posted: Fri Dec 27 11:32:56 1985
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From: Dawn Banks <DEC.BANKS@MARLBORO.DEC.COM>

This message is a public apology for my rude behavior directed towards Mr. 
Freed.  Anyone is free to ignore this message if they prefer to think of
me as a rude person:

You, of course are absolutely correct that I should not have posted that to the
entire net (excepting the plea to get everyone off this subject without 
mentioning anyone in particular).

On the other point, the drystone benchmark that provided the in excees of 1000
number has been discussed (and posted) several times over the last month.  In
fact, it was posted over a month ago shortly after the first person quoted the
less appealling number which came from the (most appalling) Lattice C
benchmark.  It has also been uniformly ignored by anyone who doesn't want to
hear that the Amiga can live up to its clock speed.  Whether you are one of
these individuals who chose to ignore the prior postings, or whether you
entered the conversation late enough to have missed the other postings is
unknown to me, and I appologize again for assuming wrongly if you are indeed in
the latter case.  The mail message was written in the "heat of the moment" when
I'd been absolutely fed up with the hundreds of postings claiming that the
Amiga is no good, holding out a single benchmark as proof.

Believe me, if you've ever read code produced by the Lattice C compiler (as I
have), you'd have no doubt that it is a major cause for the poor benchmark
numbers we've seen.  As straight machine speeds go, the only valid comparison
for raw, usable CPU power would be arrived at if the benchmark had been coded
in assembler, with the machine independent parts being identical on both 
machines.

There is a valid discussion to be had, however, as to the usefulness of a 
machine whose sole compiler produces such horridly slow (and large) code.  This
is a reflection on the machine in that anything compiled using the Amiga's
default C compiler would probably be slower than the same program compiled
on one of the competition's machine, using the competition's compiler.  While
being a valid concern, it would have little or nothing to do with the actual
hardware it's running on other than guilt by association with sleazy compilers.
With any luck, someone will introduce a native compiler that corrects these
problems.  In the mean time, my personal preference is assembler anyway (which
could get me started on what I think of the Amiga's assembler ...).

Again, my appologies.

							D. Banks
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