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From: ths@eyelab.UUCP (Tom Speeter)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Processing Speed?
Message-ID: <106@eyelab.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 23-Jan-86 22:28:36 EST
Article-I.D.: eyelab.106
Posted: Thu Jan 23 22:28:36 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 30-Jan-86 05:55:23 EST
Organization: CWRU Dept. Neurology, Cleveland, OH
Lines: 29


    One of the assumptions I made before purchasing the Mac
was that the 68000 could whiz through numerical calculations
and impress my friends with its speed.  Even pardoning
the disk drives' lethargy, I'm a little disappointed by
its CPU intensive operations as well.  I've downloaded some 'C'
programs from a PDP 11/44 and observed the differences in
processing speed.  What a difference!!
    The programs are primarily matrix manipulations using
double precision arrays.  The PDP runs a representitive
program in 75 seconds, the Mac takes 4000 seconds (thats over
an hour!!).  I used Aztec C's 1.00D compiler, purportedly one
of the faster version of 'C' for the Mac (I'd hate to use a
slower one).  At least the code was portable, didn't have to
change a line!
    Now I realize that the 11/44 has floating point hardware
and is in an entirely different class, but a 50 fold decrease in
speed is a little hard to believe.  With the recent revelation
of the Mac+ and its orientation toward increased size and not
speed I think Apple may be forgetting those of us who want to
crunch, not expand.
    Any comments about this, or suggestions for speeding
things up?  I see an occasional posting about the faster 68???
chip and boards from outside vendors, but whats Apple doing
for people (I know you're out there) who want floating point
speed, and not room for the entire collection of 1985 tax forms? 

                             Tom Speeter
                                (cwruecmp!eyelab!ths)