Editing ABC 80 (section)

== Performance ==
In order to see how the ABC 80 would compare to other contemporary personal computers, in 1982, the Swedish magazine ''[[MikroDatorn]]'' ran the [[Rugg/Feldman benchmarks]] of eight short BASIC programs (referred to as BM1~BM8) originally published by the American ''[[Kilobaud Microcomputing]]'' magazine and routinely used by the British magazine [[Personal Computer World]] for testing new machines. The result was that ABC 80's interpreter turned out to be faster than most other BASICs used in popular machines, especially when [[integer]] variables are used, the results for some well known computers were as follows (times in seconds, lower is better):

{| class="wikitable"
|- 
! Computer              || [[Central processing unit|CPU]] || &#91;[[Hertz|MHz]]&#93; ||BM1 ||BM2 ||BM3 ||BM4 ||BM5 ||BM6 ||BM7 ||BM8
|-
| ABC 80 Integer
|rowspan="2"| [[Zilog Z80|Z80]]
|rowspan="2"| 3   ||0.3 ||1.1 ||3.5 ||3.5 ||3.6 ||5.8 ||9.3 ||65
|-
| ABC 80 Floating point ||1.0 ||2.1 ||11.0 ||11.0  ||12.5 ||17.5 ||24.0 ||130
|-
| colspan="11"|&nbsp;
|-
| [[IBM PC]] || [[Intel 8088|8088]] || 4.77  <!-- Assumed!! --> ||1.5 ||5.2 ||12.1||12.6||13.6||23.5||37.4||35
|-
| [[Apple III]] || [[Synertek|S6502]] || 2 ||1.7 ||7.2 ||13.5||14.5||16.0||27.0||42.5||75
|-
| [[VIC-20]] || [[MOS Technology 6502|6502]] || 1.108 || 1.4 ||8.3 ||15.5||17.1||18.3||27.2||42.7||99
|-
| [[ZX81]] in "fast mode" || [[Zilog Z80|Z80]] || 3.25 || 4.5 || 6.9 || 16.4 || 15.8 || 18.6 || 49.7 || 68.5 || 229
|}

The ABC 80 was  up to {{nowrap|4.7 times}} as fast as the [[IBM PC]] using integers and up to {{nowrap|2.5 times}} as fast using [[floating point]] math. However, due to a sub-optimal [[exponentiation]] [[algorithm]], the ABC 80 was slow on BM8 (which was fixed in the [[ABC 800]]). Compared to the [[ZX81]], the ABC 80 was {{nowrap|15 times}} as fast on the simple loop of BM1 (with the ZX81 running in ''fast'' mode, i.e. without a continuous TV-picture).