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From: ali@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Ali Ozer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Prodigy vs Mac II
Message-ID: <342@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Mon, 1-Jun-87 15:11:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocky.342
Posted: Mon Jun  1 15:11:32 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 3-Jun-87 04:48:18 EDT
References: <1740@mhuxt.UUCP> <1090@harvard.UUCP>
Reply-To: ali@rocky.UUCP (Ali Ozer)
Organization: Stanford University Computer Science Department
Lines: 27
Keywords: Prodigy Prime, Mac II, mandelbrot set

In article <1090@harvard.UUCP> olson@harvard.UUCP (Eric Olson) writes:
>In article <1740@mhuxt.UUCP> evans@mhuxt.UUCP (Steve Crandall) writes:
>>The Prodigy Prime was almost 2x as fast as the Mac II!!! 
>>Can anyone explain the difference? (I can understand a 10 or 20% difference,
>>but 100% is hard to swallow).
>Part of the time difference is that the Prodigy, when properly configured 
>(i.e., use Mac RAM for RAMDisk, Prodigy RAM for RAM), has zero wait state
>memory.  ... Also the Mac II has a larger
>screen (if a full-screen graphics test) and Color quickdraw bottlenecks in
>various places.

According to some values passed on to me by a friend, the savage benchmark
runs considerably (> 2x) faster on the 14 MHz Turbo Amiga than on the
16 MHz Mac II. (This is taking into consideration the effects of
the languages used by looking at the performance of the same program
on the Mac Plus vs the 68000 Amiga.) The reason must lie in the fact that
the 68020 in the Mac II has to do a lot more housekeeping work than the
68020 in the Prodigy or the Turbo Amiga. (In the case of the Turbo Amiga all
graphics operations are still done by the 68000/blitter combo and the
68020 is free to do whatever it wants in its 32 bit memory at the same time.)

[ps. I might be wrong here --- Maybe it has to do with the fact that the
 language used for the Mac II was not as good when it came to generating
 code for the 68020/68881 combo. Just for reference, the savage benchmark
 value quoted to me for the Mac II was 4 seconds.]

Ali Ozer, ali@rocky.stanford.edu