[300bps]

I've programmed in 6502 Assembly for decades and your skepticism is right on.

These comparisons have so many variables that they are extremely hard to make accurately.

FTA - I would have guessed that the 8088 is much faster at about the same clock speed, because it has more 16-bit operations and does multiplication and division in hardware.

Does the compiler of the compiler make use of these extra 16-bit operations? How many layers of abstraction does it go through for each of the environments? Does it use DOS interrupts when running on DOS and optimized machine code on CP/M?

These comparisons are strange thought experiments.

[nils-m-holm]

The compiler uses the same level of optimization on both DOS and CP/M. It is self-compiled on both platforms. It uses DOS interrupts on DOS and BDOS functions on CP/M, but I/O is really not a big issue here. The DOS compiler does make use of the extra 16-bit operations.

Is it still an inaccurate comparison? Sure. But I expected something dramatically different, so I asked.