Nobody asked for this. Nobody needs this. But here we are …
Inspired by J. G. Harston’s clever but domain-specific ClockSp benchmark, I set out to write a BASIC benchmark suite that was:
- more portable;
- based on a benchmark system that more people might own;
- and a bunch of other less important ideas.
Since I already had a Commodore 64, and seemingly several million other people did too, it seemed like a fair choice to use as the reference system. But the details, so many details …
(I mean: who knew that Commodore PET BASIC could run faster or slower depending on how your numbered your lines? Not me — until today, that is.)
While the benchmark doesn’t scale well for BASIC running on modern computers — the comparisons between a simple 8-bit processor at a few MHz and a multi-core wildly complex modern CPU at many GHz just aren’t applicable — it turns out I may have one of the fastest 8-bit BASIC computers around in the matchbox-sized shape of the MinZ v1.1 (36.864 Z180, CP/M 2.2, BBC BASIC [Z80] v3):
BASIC BENCH INDEX
>I GOOD. NTSC C64=100
1/8 - FOR:
3.2 S; 12778 /S; I= 1895
2/8 - GOTO:
6.1 S; 4324.5 /S; I= 978
3/8 - GOSUB:
3.1 S; 6789 /S; I= 1935
4/8 - IF:
2.9 S; 4966.9 /S; I= 2046
5/8 - FN:
3.5 S; 1030.6 /S; I= 1698
6/8 - MATHS:
1.5 S; 255.3 /S; I= 4000
7/8 - STRING:
2.6 S; 1871.6 /S; I= 2279
8/8 - ARRAY:
3.1 S; 540.3 /S; I= 1935
OVERALL INDEX= 1839
That’s more than 9× the speed of a BBC Micro Model B.
Github link: bench64 – a new BASIC benchmark index for 8-bit computers.
Archive download: