Hi, Kevin,

It's incredible how critical the cache is for Squeak performance.
>From comparing Tim and your figures, it looks like the larger
cache of the SA110 nearly doubles Squeak performance at the same
clock speed. Of course, some of the increase is from the C code
optimization in Tim's VM, but it's hard to imagine that accounting
for more than 20-30% of the difference.

For comparison, here are the figures for two Sharp Zaurus
PDA's, both with Hitachi SH-3 processors:

  ~120 MHz: 2941176 bytecodes/sec, 133739 sends/sec
   ~60 MHz: 1801801 bytecodes/sec,  61584 sends/sec

I can't fire up my Casio E-105 right now, but I think it had
performance similar to the faster SH-3 above.

If you manage to get the comiler to do some optimization, let
me know how much difference that makes.

We actually have an iPaq and I am looking forward to getting
Squeak up on it. You mentioned that you were writing down the
steps needed to put Squeak on the iPaq. Let me know when that's
available (but no rush; it's the holidays!). If I can get the
proper development environment set up, I may try to compile
a VM myself. Perhaps there is some level of C optimization that
produces correct but faster code.

One question: How much RAM is available for the Squeak object
heap? (See the VM statistics available under the "help" menu.)

	-- John


Kevin wrote:
>I managed to get the image on a read/write segment of memory and I 
>got that benchmark for you...the result of "0 tinyBenchmarks" is:
>4667444 bytecodes/sec; 155544 sends/sec
>
>Note that this is on an unoptimized VM (compiling with optimizations
>has problems on ARM).

Tim Rowledge wrote:
>That's not too bad for an unoptimized VM; my 202MHz SA110 Acorn (2
>x bigger cache than iPaq SA1100, but much slower main memory bus  - hey,
>it's six years old!) gets 10m & 374k on the same test. I _think_ I got
>up to about 8m bc/sec on the original Itsy port. On a 276MHz SA110
>NetWinder I think it's more like 12m & 600k.