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”.