MICROSYSTEMS PERFORMANCE: WHEN TO BENCHMARK AND WHY
M R Wigan · 1984
Transport and traffic workers have begun to use microcomputers to an increasing extent. The plethora of such systems on the market makes it important to have a sound basis for selection of hardware and software. Engineering and scientific applications are not well served in the market, and the quality and performance of the available FORTRAN compilers of such importance to this area of application are not well known or documented. A systematic set of comparisons of the relevant microprocessors and compilers is presented, with examples of less quantifiable measures of performance than the benchmark execution speeds alone. Detailed benchmark results are given for mathematical and input/output dominated tasks, and a range of comparisons are given between z80, 8088 and 68000 systems and compilers. Recommendations are made for traffic and transport engineers, based on the results obtained in the testing program, and graphical displays are provided produced by one of the systems used at the Monash Workshop on Microcomputers in Transport for which this paper was prepared. (Author/TRRL)