Million Instructions per Second

[Britelite]

Using those same conditions the 68000 in the Amiga should be able to reach 3.5 MIPS.

I'm guessing you mean 1.75 MIPS, as the fastest instructions are 4 cycles on the 68000.

[rabindranath72]

Yet, as crap as it was, the 8088 had memory segmentation, which helped with UNIX OSes, whereas for the more powrful 68000 to run UNIX without additional hardware you needed nasty software tricks (like process shadowing, which killed any speed advantage of the processor) or costly external hardware.

[commodorejohn]

Comparing an 8088 to a 68000 is a little unfair. It was just the cost reduced version of the 8086, like the 68008 was a cost reduced version of 68000. Yes the 8086 wasn't a great design, but they didn't expect it to define the industry. It was just a logical progression from the 8008 chip that they produced in 1972 & they started making CPU's to give people a reason to buy the RAM chips they made to put them in calculators etc.

Fair point. I wasn't really intending to lambast the 8088 for not being the 68000, I just wanted to draw some points of comparison in explaining why the 8088 suffered from performance issues.
 

However the 8088 does compare well to a 6502. The c64 beat CGA PC's in terms of games because of the vic & sid chips.

Yes and no. The 8088 is definitely more powerful from an architectural standpoint, and faster, fundamentally, at 16-bit operations. On the other hand, the bottleneck imposed by the 8-bit bus is seriously crippling for it, and it's not as cycle-efficient to begin with (though not as badly as the 68000.) And again, that's not getting into the additional issues imposed by PC-manufacturer cheap-outs like memory wait states (which only exacerbate the already-problematic memory bottleneck.)

The 6502, on the other hand, doesn't do much, but it does it very well. But yes, a lot of the C64's success had to do with the excellent peripheral chips.

[psxphill]

Yes and no. The 8088 is definitely more powerful from an architectural standpoint, and faster, fundamentally, at 16-bit operations. On the other hand, the bottleneck imposed by the 8-bit bus is seriously crippling for it, and it's not as cycle-efficient to begin with

It is only a problem when you're doing 16 bit loads and stores, which you'd have to do with two separate accesses on the 6502 as well. I haven't done a comparison of every instruction but the fastest 8088 instruction is supposed to be 2 clock cycles.
 
If running on the same ram then they are probably around the same speed cpu wise, but with support for more ram in the 8088 and 16 bit maths when you need it.
 
I like the 6502 & it's main feature was the low cost, so not having some of the more expensive stuff is fine.
 
The 68000 was ubber expensive though, so it's unsurprising that it has more features.