From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!vax135!lime!houxg!houxi!npois!ucbvax!C70:info-cpm Newsgroups: fa.info-cpm Title: [decvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uicsovax!kline: IBM PC Benchmark - (nf)] Article-I.D.: ucb.1109 Posted: Tue May 18 01:17:21 1982 Received: Wed May 19 03:44:44 1982 >From W8SDZ@Mit-Mc Tue May 18 01:17:10 1982 Date: 17 May 82 14:26:59-PDT (Mon) From: decvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uicsovax!kline at Berkeley To: info-micro at mit-ai Re: IBM PC Benchmark - (nf) Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.129 Via: news.usenet; 17 May 82 19:10-PDT #R:duke:-212900:uicsovax:3700002:000:742 uicsovax!kline May 14 11:14:00 1982 Even if the 8088 is taking advantage of the 16-bit architecture, It will be slowed by the fact that it only has an 8-bit external bus. Even with the 16-bit registers, floating point single precision values are represented by 32 or more bits, causing memory references through the just-as-slow-as-an-8080 8-bit bus. I would suspect that the 16-bit register advantage of the 8088 will manifest itself in integer arithmetic; where (in Microsoft BASIC anyway) integers are represented with 16-bit values, and thus the 8088 can keep the entire operands in itself while operating on them, cutting down on memory references and eliminating the bottleneck on the bus. I haven't, however, been able to get at an IBM PC to test out this theory.