The Amazing NES: 8 million floating point operations per sec

[Dwedit]

According to some awful infographic from experts-exchange.com, the 1.78MHz NES can do 8 million floating point operations per second.

[JRoatch]

Nice, that's 4 floating point operations per cycle! Also I have absolutely no clue how one gets a single floating point computation out of the PPU.

[Drew Sebastino]

Nice, that's 4 floating point operations per cycle!

The Genesis apparently also does... (30 million instructions per second)

"experts"exchange.com credibility = 0

[93143]

If I'm reading this correctly, even with both the Mega CD and 32X attached it doesn't reach 30 MIPS, never mind MFLOPS as the chart says...

[Drew Sebastino]

I'm not entirely sure how they calculated that the Apollo Guidance Computer was twice as powerful as the NES's 6502, unless they're going by ram which is a terrible thing to base it on. It was apparently capable of 16 bit operations, including multiplication and division, but the clock frequency was also apparently divided by 2 for the thing to actually use for only 1.024 Mhz. I cannot find how many cycles each instruction uses, but so far it seems like both processors are about tied, but they are of course better suited for what they are intended to be used in.

[Sik]

If I'm reading this correctly, even with both the Mega CD and 32X attached it doesn't reach 30 MIPS, never mind MFLOPS as the chart says...

Technically 32X alone would reach 30 MIPS (since SH2 instructions are single cycle and it has two of them at around 23MHz).

But yeah, the amount of bullshit can't be understated.

I'm not entirely sure how they calculated that the Apollo Guidance Computer was twice as powerful as the NES's 6502, unless they're going by ram which is a terrible thing to base it on.

2MHz vs 1MHz. Apparently (because NES is actually closer to 2MHz than 1MHz).

Basically completely bogus numbers and such. Bonus points for claiming at the beginning that they actually account for this stuff!

EDIT: find a font that renders tildes as something other than a dash =|

[93143]

Technically 32X alone would reach 30 MIPS (since SH2 instructions are single cycle and it has two of them at around 23MHz).

Replace "32X" with "SVP chip", then.

What is the difference between "issue cycles" and "latency cycles" on that datasheet? I took a pessimistic approach and added them...

[Drew Sebastino]

2MHz vs 1MHz. Apparently (because NES is actually closer to 2MHz than 1MHz).

They were trying to claim that the Apollo Guidance Computer was twice as powerful as the NES, not that the NES was twice as powerful.

Basically completely bogus numbers and such.

Pretty much.

Bonus points for claiming at the beginning that they actually account for this stuff!

"experts"echange.com credibility = -100

[Drew Sebastino]

I just noticed something: on the graph measuring cpu speed, the N64 is only a hair above the playstation. Isn't the N64's cpu about 3x as powerful, seeing that they are both MIPS processors and the N64's is clocked about 3x as fast, not including that it can do 64 bit operations?

[Sik]

2MHz vs 1MHz. Apparently (because NES is actually closer to 2MHz than 1MHz).

They were trying to claim that the Apollo Guidance Computer was twice as powerful as the NES, not that the NES was twice as powerful.

No, they claimed Apollo was 2MHz and NES was 1MHz... they couldn't even get those numbers right =P (since the NES clock speed is almost 2MHz)

[rainwarrior]

The graphic clearly says 1.8 MHz, not 1.

http://i.imgur.com/O0KRHUO.jpg

I think they're probably just thinking that the speed is equivalent but the RAM is doubled, and that these two factors are somehow multiplicative w.r.t. processing power.

Edit: You know what, they're probably not that dumb. I think Speed and RAM are just the only numerical statistics they could find to stick on the chart, and its probably not representing their entire methodology. Apollo as roughly 2x an NES seems like a decent estimate after thinking more about it.

[Bregalad]

Holy god, this is some wacky bullshit. But with a coprocessor in the cartridge, it would be possible for the NES to do 8 million floating points per second

EDIT : Or maybe they meant 8 thousand? That would give 223 cycles per floating point operation, probably below the truth but reasonable if they're optimized for speed somehow.

[Drew Sebastino]

I'm not entirely sure how they calculated that the Apollo Guidance Computer was twice as powerful as the NES's 6502, unless they're going by ram which is a terrible thing to base it on.

I think they're probably just thinking that the speed is equivalent but the RAM is doubled, and that these two factors are somehow multiplicative w.r.t. processing power.

I really don't see how an old computer from 1966 that wasn't really a super computer but probably still high end would be twice as powerful than a consumer one from 1983. (Famicom) The AGC doesn't even run at 2MHz, it gets cut in half... (I'm assuming it would be like if you said the SNES's 65816 was running at 21MHz, because it hasn't gone through the divider yet like the 2MHz AGC.)

I still think the PS being that close to the N64 is a bunch of BS. (See what I did there?)


From what I've seen of the website, it looks weird... I looked at the "technical" thing and the categories where like: Microsoft Excel, Windows XP, JavaScript. I bet half of the people have never seen any sort of assembly language. (They couldn't have if they think a 1.8 MHz processor is capable of 8 million instructions...)

[93143]

(They couldn't have if they think a 1.8 MHz processor is capable of 8 million instructions...)

A modern superscalar one could do it. Of course the 6502 is not one of those... and the claim wasn't IPS; it was FLOPS, which is much worse...

[tepples]

"experts"exchange.com credibility = 0

Ever since Stack Overflow and Super User came out, there has been little need for Expert S-ex Change.

How many flops came out of LJN and Active?