ByPic is VERY cool!

Finally got to power-up my BV509.

I love the interactive ByPic OS/language. This BV509 is looking like the ideal companion for the Parallax Propeller development that I am working on.

Well done, Jim!

Can't believe that this thing is not more popular.

Cheers,

Tinine

Thanks :-)

Interesting thread over on thebackshed forum, comparing '80s PCs to the performance of today's microcontrollers.

The benchmark results are really quite impressive and so I decided to run them through the ByPic...WOW!!! My results are on page 4.

ByPic is the best-kept secret in the microcontroller world....word needs to get out there!!!!!

Summary of results. As of this posting, the fastest MM example is the one identified below (smaller numbers = faster):

Micromite EXTREME 198MHz / BV508 40MHz

0.006 / 0.001 (ByPic is 6 times faster with a 5 times slower clock!)
0.045 / 0.010
0.070 / 0.023
0.080 / 0.020
0.141 / 0.027
0.201 / 0.041
0.287 / 0.080
0.126 / 0.043

Hi,
very interesting and something I have not done before.

ABC 800 single precision   0.9    1.8     6.0    5.9    6.3   11.6   19.6    2.9  
ABC 800 double precision   1.2    2.2    10.0   10.6   11.0   17.8   26.4   14.4  
IBM PC                     1.5    5.2    12.1   12.6   13.6   23.5   37.4    3.5  
Apple III                  1.7    7.2    13.5   14.5   16.0   27.0   42.5    7.5  
VIC-20                     1.4    8.3    15.5   17.1   18.3   27.2   42.7    9.9  
ZX81 in "fast mode"        4.5    6.9    16.4   15.8   18.6   49.7   68.5   22.9  

Maximite                   0.016  0.144  0.196  0.205  0.354  0.512  0.721  0.310  

Maximite with line Nos     0.016  0.131  0.193  0.194  0.245  0.393  0.582  0.241  
Maximite without line Nos  0.016  0.111  0.173  0.173  0.192  0.336  0.525  0.220  
MicroMite 40MHz            0.028  0.18   0.285  0.289  0.644  0.892  1.346  0.376  
MicroMite 48MHz            0.023  0.15   0.237  0.24   0.536  0.744  1.121  0.313  

st429 180Mhz               0.012  0.073  0.117  0.125  0.207  0.315  0.497  0.162  
st407 168Mhz               0.010  0.067  0.104  0.111  0.195  0.290  0.443  0.146  

MX470 120MHz MMBasic       0.013  0.082  0.135  0.135  0.265  0.380  0.597  0.174 

st7 200Mhz                 0.005  0.041  0.06   0.065  0.11   0.161  0.254  0.103  

Micromite EXTREME 198MHz   0.006  0.045  0.07   0.08   0.141  0.201  0.287  0.126
MX170 40MHz ByPic          0.001  0.010  0.023  0.020  0.027  0.041  0.080  0.043

Before ByPic I did have a similar BASIC to the slow ones above that interpreted line by line but having used it for practical applications realised that it was a bit too slow for quite a few of them so wrote ByPic based on the principles of the Forth language. It is interesting to see just how slow the older machines were.

Even using assembler the Z80 running at 4.7MHz was only just fast enough to fetch a sector off of a 5 1/4" floppy disk. It had to be done in a very tight assembler loop as the data came off in real time. Once the sector had been retrieved it took so long to process it that the next 2 sectors or so had gone by and so instead of reading sector 1,2,3 etc you had to read something line 1,3,6 etc. I was called 'skew'. The bottom line was that the disk had to spin round several times on the same track to get all of the data off of that track. This was all detailed in the C/PM user guide.

Anyway, thanks for that it shows that ByPic is meant for doing practical things.
Jim