pixelpusher wrote: ↑Thu Apr 30, 2020 4:56 pm
Would probably be an interesting case study in an emulator to do an opcode analysis over a larger amount of apps at runtime and my bets would be on divisions are an edge case in the big picture. As long as you don't get the surrounding operations much faster, the effective speedup doesn't scale well with the frequency increase.
That's why I tend to use EEMBC CoreMark® to assess the speed of Atari systems and accelerators. Imho, CoreMark contains multiple algorithms that you would also find in real software and, therefore, gives a much better indication of total speed than, e.g., Gembench's "Integer Division" number.
Source code of my port to Atari:
https://github.com/czietz/coremark
Compiled version and some results in this thread:
https://forum.atari-home.de/index.php/t ... 024.0.html
For example, you can see that --
without cache -- doubling the CPU clock to 16 MHz in the MegaSTE only gives about 10%(!) speed increase. That's because RAM access is not accelerated. Only with cache you're able to see a big boost.
EDIT: Just to mention, CoreMark is meant to assess
CPU and RAM speed. By design, it does not call any OS functions during the benchmark. Thus, to see the effects of faster ROM access (e.g., on VDI drawing speed) by Exxos' boosters you still need to use Gembench.