HP Prime vs HP71 benchmark

[cyrille de brébisson]

Hello,

The most surprising thing is that Prime is not much faster than the 71.

Prime runs at 400Mhz, I do not know how fast the 71 runs....
However, the 71, being based on a Saturn CPU also has slow instructions (ie, the instructions can take up to 15 or 20 CPU cycles to execute). Most Prime CPU instructions only take 1 cycle....

However, the Prime programming language will be much less efficient than the 71 as the 71 interpreted does not need to do any type of memory allocation or things like that while the prime will have to do a LOT of them.

BTW, you can optimize the Prime program as follow: It will run around 1.5 times faster I think...
EXPORT PI2()
BEGIN
H:=0;
T:=0;
S:=Ticks;
RANDSEED(1);
WHILE 1 DO
for A:= 1 to 10000 DO
H:= H+IP(RANDOM()^2+RANDOM()^2);
end;
T:= T+10000;
E:= TICKS-S;
PRINT("T:"+T+" PI:"+4*(T-H)/T+" E:"+E);
END;
END;