Noel's Retro Lab bench mark test - we have a new leader

Noel's Retro Lab is a popular YouTube Channel that discusses many computers and related hardware. One thing I like about this channel is the detail Noel goes in to especially when repairing 8 and 16-bit personal computers. He gives a good overview of the hardware, and usually runs a BASIC bench mark as a way to compare one machine to another. This bench mark program is as follows:

10 FOR i=1 TO 10
20 s=0
30 FOR j=1 TO 1000
40 s=s+j
50 NEXT j
60 PRINT ".";
70 NEXT i
80 PRINT s

Noel has been adding the results (in seconds) for each machine that he has run this program on, and many of his friends and followers have contributed to this. You may see system-by-system comparisons in a Google Sheet here.

Until today, the fastest system has been the ZX Specrum Next, though it needs to be running at 28Mhz, and use Integers rather than floating point variables. It completes in 5 seconds, and for a BASIC interpreter on a Z80 computer that is pretty quick.

As I'd set up my Commodore C128D-Cr again yesterday, which has a CMD SuperCPU, RAMLink, FD2000, a Commodore 1581 and an Ultimate 1541 II attached to it (or the U1541 II alternates with the RAMLink due to compatibility issues with the two devices) I decided to try the aforementioned bench mark symbolic listing to see the results on my power system. I first tried it in C128 80 columns mode, and found that it was faster than 5 seconds (at least with BASIC or FULL optimisation enabled) - so I'd need a reliable way to time it accurately.

All variants of Commodore 8-bit BASIC have a TI$ system variable. This will tell you the number of seconds since you switched your computer on (by default) and may be set to the current time in HHMMSS format. Related to this is the TI system variable, which counts the 60ths of a second since the computer was switched on (by default), and is reset if the TI$ system variable is set to midnight. So I did a typical thing for Commodore BASIC bench marking by adding the following BASIC lines:

0 TI$="000000"
80 PRINT S:PRINT"SECONDS"TI/60,"JIFFIES"TI

At its fastest, and in C128 BASIC 7 and 80 columns mode, the bench mark completed in about 3.2 seconds with either BASIC or FULL optimisation mode set. I therefore knew that C64 BASIC 2 would be faster than this.

You may see the results on my official Twitter feed, but a heads up: in C64 mode the fastest result is under 2 seconds.

I'm now going to try this same bench marking on my Ultimate 64 at 48Mhz. I expect that the results to be under 1 second. I may optimise the U64 further to see if I can get this bench mark to run in under half a second without optimising the BASIC listing.

One thing to note about bench marking is that you may get misleading results that may or may not fit your personal agenda. I saw a YouTube video on how the Turbo Chameleon [TC] is faster than the SuperCPU. And yet, at the time of writing at least, the TC doesn't have a Doom port. Not in its C64 emulation anyway.