Relative speed of 15C, 34S and 42S

[Michael de Estrada]

I recently received a DM42, and was curious as to its relative speed when compared to the original HP model as well as other similar models. I used a program originally written for the HP-15C that makes use of matrix operations and the root solver. I timed the execution with a watch, so the results are very crude, but they do give an indication of the relative speeds of these calculators. The results in descending order of execution times are as follows:

HP 15C: 30 sec

HP 42S: 10 sec

HP 15C Limited Edition: 2 sec

DM 15L @ 48 MHz: 2 sec

WP 34S (HP 30b): 1 sec

DM 42 @ 24 MHz: << 1 sec

The most surprising result to me is how much faster the DM 42 runs, despite using twice the precision of the other calculators and not having the fastest CPU clock.