Emulator vs simulator performance

[J-F Garnier]

The question arises to know what is the order of magnitude of the performance penalty of an emulator versus a native application.

(06-05-2020 12:39 AM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  

Quote:An emulator adds the overhead of the CPU/hardware simulation; Free42 is a native application. All depends on the performance of the emulation engine, I can't really judge the x60 ratio but it's the order of magnitude we can expect

I don't concur. A factor of 60x is just too much, no emulation should be that inefficient. Say 10x would be acceptable, if slow, but 60x ? Really ? Converting a 10 seconds running time to 10 minutes ? A 10 minutes running time to 10 hours ? That would be a horribly inefficient emulation, direct-to-garbage-bin class.

Ok, so let's compare Free42 and Emu42, that have similar functionalities and are both high quality software recognized by the community, and let's compare them on the same host system.

You may say, it's not fair, Free42 provides much better accuracy with its 35-digit arithmetic, so let's also include the binary version that has similar arithmetic accuracy.

I will not use a trivial benchmark but the program from the latest article from Valentin, that computes the area of the Mandelbrot set (great article, Valentin, I may comment it later in an other thread).
The program is run to evaluate 10,000 points with the other default parameters.
The display is fully static during Valentin's program run (no display updates, no flying goose).

Emu42 and Free42 are run separately, during the run they each use about one of the core of my core-i3 machine (global CPU loading ~25-30%).
Of course, Emu42 is run with authentic calculator speed off.

Emu42 1.24 : 5min08s
Free42 2.5.18 decimal : 6.3s
Free42 2.5.18 binary : 2.0s
Emu42 execution time measured by hand, Free42 execution measured using TIME.

J-F