Maybe this email list has some details?

(http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/0...)

Here's a mildly interesting rant:

(http://www.yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.html)

This post doesn't give any details of the benchmark, but describes another test (boot, load word processor, open document, close wp, shut down) and compares an old mac and a (at the time) modern laptop.

(http://tekkie.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/does-computer-science...)

Thank you. Looks like I'm not the first to ask. Doubt I'll be the first to get an answer.

Wrt the last post, I'll note my openbsd laptop can complete that challenge before many other machines have made it past post, so all hope is not lost.

And we had wysiwyg HTML editors eons ago. The switch to online markdown editors was a trade off, but it's not like the secrets of the ancients were lost when the library of parc was burned to the ground.

I'll hazard a guess as to what's going on here. The OP mentions the B5000's use of descriptors. I think it's decoding a descriptor and doing bounds checking on every array access. That would certainly slow down a machine that didn't have hardware support for these operations.

That's a fairly trivial optimization for a jit to perform. And a 1000x penalty for bounds checking? No way, that would literally require your bounds check to take a minimum of 1000 instructions, even assuming your inner loop didn't do anything meaningful with the accessed value.