From: utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uicsovax!kline
Newsgroups: net.micro
Title: Re: IBM PC Benchmark - (nf)
Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.129
Posted: Mon May 17 14:26:59 1982
Received: Tue May 18 01:49:56 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.