From: utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uicsovax!kline Newsgroups: net.micro Title: Re: IBM PC Benchmark - (nf) Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.131 Posted: Mon May 17 15:25:46 1982 Received: Tue May 18 01:45:41 1982 Reply-To: s #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.