Mike Douglas just posted the following to the FLEX Users Group mailing list:
I have created two versions of the "Byte Sieve" benchmark to run on the SWTPC 6800 and one to run on an 8080 machine (Altair 8800). This benchmark was first published in the Sep 1981 issue of BYTE magazine. The test was designed to allow comparison between different languages/compilers on a given machine, and to compare between machines given the same language/compiler.
For the first 6800 version, I took the C language version of the benchmark and pretended I was a mediocre compiler and generated a 6800 assembly source file. For the second 6800 version, I optimized the code as a good assembly language programmer would do. Here are the results on a SWTPC 6800 computer (1 MHz):
"C" version: 28.25 seconds
Optimized assembly version: 11.85 seconds
As expected, a well written assembly language version is substantially faster than a non-optimized compiled program.
Through a wide variety of tests in the past, I have found the 8080 at 2 MHz and the 6800 at 1 MHz to be closely on par with each other. However, for this Sieve benchmark, which uses a lot of array/indexed operations, the extra 16 bit registers of the 8080 clearly provide an advantage:
Optimized assembly version: 8.18 seconds
You can find the 6800 versions of the Sieve benchmark here:
https://deramp.com/downloads/swtpc/soft ... Benchmark/The 8080 version is here:
https://deramp.com/downloads/altair/sof ... ellaneous/Mike D