[gallier2]

There are also some very questionable statements in the articlle like saying that 6502 instructions only need one cycle. It's 2 to 7 in reality. Over the years the comparison between 6502 vs Z80 tend to show that you have to clock the Z80 at about twice the frequency of the 6502 to get the same performance. 8088 having a slight edge over the Z80 it is clear that a 5 MHz will be quite faster than a 1 MHz 6502 (C64 was even under 1MHz as the VIC chip would steal some cycles every 8th display line)

[weinzierl]

"C64 was even under 1MHz"

Not that it matters much, but strictly speaking this is true only for the PAL version.

[NovemberWhiskey]

For what it's worth ... https://github.com/Keith-S-Thompson/dhrystone/blob/master/v2...

On the Dhrystone 1.0 micro-benchmark, a C64 is ~36/s, whereas the PC/XT models tested (basically same as the original PC) are more like 300+/s.

[classichasclass]

A C benchmark on the 6502 seems suspect to me given that the 6502's architecture tends to make writing stack-based language compilers for it more complicated than other platforms. Some of the difference may be just because the object code generated for the 6502 isn't efficient.

That said, any 16-bit optimizations the 8088's compiler could take advantage of, well, that's fair game.