Someone in the Danish amiga community asked if the 68010 is faster than the 68000.
The short answer is No, and the long one Yes.
There is a slight improvement which you might be able to feel for CPU intensive work. But for gaming? naaa.. you might see a slight smoother scrolling for vector based games.
For the tests, I’ve created a bootable floppy. It has Sysinfo, WhichAmiga and AIBB on it. And I’ve chosen AIBB as benchmark program for this test.
I’ve used the same A500 for both tests, with a 512KB ram upgrade getting up to 1MB. The A500 ran Kickstart 1.3. Nothing other than switching out the 68000 with the 68010 has been done with the 2 A500 systems
You’ll see 4 systems in the images
A600-NF – This system comes with AIBB, and I can guess it’s a stock A600 (68000)
A500_1M – A500 with 512kB ram upgrade (68000@7MHz)
A500-010 – A500 with 512kB ram upgrade (68010@7MHz)
A1200-030 – A1200 Blizzard1230 MK IV 030@50MHz, 64MB ram
It is rumoured that there are quite a few applications that require a 68020 actually runs fine on the 68010 due to instructions needed are in the 68010. I haven’t seen any of these applications, but if you find any please report them here so I can add them to a list. If you run into issues using 68010, the Decigel software might help you out.
Otherwise I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves and make it up to you to decide if you want to upgrade your system.
You can download the diskette with the modules created here.
If you only want to preview the results without testing on your own system, you can go to the menu “Special” and activate “Preview mode”.
Why 68000 and 68010 were tested without Fast RAM like on blizzard 1230?
the 68010 is a drop in cpu replacement and not an accelerator.
Interesting article – I’ve just done this upgrade to my A500. I assume the 68010 is working as the A500 boots up fine but running SysInfo still shows my CPU as a 68000… any idea why that might be please?
I’ve got a few programs that require an 020 that wouldn’t run on my A500 before so I’ll be sure to give them another go now too!
My best guess is that SysInfo doesn’t detect the 68010 cpu’s properly, or not at all, thus it just tells you it’s a 68000 🙂
68010 is first Motorola processor which penalized “self modifying code”, with crash, freeze, or coruption of everything :-)))