2010 Ti Nspire Faster than G2 HP Prime

[gastondefer]

(09-17-2022 07:21 PM)Jean-Baptiste Boric Wrote:  Two different CAS engines executing on two unrelated operating systems built with two separate toolchains running on top of two dissimilar hardware platforms have differing performance characteristics. Color me surprised.

I bet that there's one or more algorithms somewhere within the HP Prime that at the very least happen to have non-linear computational complexity in this particular case. It could be Giac itself, or a dependency, or a library, or any of the above in any combination at fault here. It doesn't matter if one calculator has a processor five times slower than the other, an O(n) algorithm on the slower machine will win against an O(n²) algorithm on the faster machine given a big enough n.

That the G1 is three times faster than the G2 in this benchmark is unexpected, but still... Despite the appearances they do not share the same operating system underneath, so it's yet more code that has potentially different performance characteristics between the two.

Discovery why exactly the HP Prime has a bad time with this input would probably require profiling its firmware. Maybe Giac happens to be the only component at fault here and profiling it on its own would reproduce the problem, but ultimately the only ones who have all the pieces to investigate this are those with full access to the HP Prime codebase.

Absolutely mate! This makes me think of the Nspire Touchpad from 2010 with slower hardware, being slightly faster than the 2011 color screen model (both CAS and non CAS) in pretty much everything I threw at it! Though I strongly suspect the color LCD to be the cause in that particular case.