HHC

[dramsey]

(09-24-2014 04:47 AM)Benoit Maag Wrote:  David Ramsey exhibited a few of his desktop models: the 9100, 9810 and 9820 and showed how they are made inside: UN-BE-LIE-VA-BLE !

Especially the 9100: how can a machine made with discrete transistors and diodes be a programmable RPN machine? And fast on top of that: we ran a primality program on his 9100 and on the HP-15C LE. The latter was just 3 times faster... after 40 years of Moore's law!

Fun meeting, Great people... hope you (whoever reads this post) can make it next year

Funny thing about that performance test: I snarked to Tim that it had taken HP 45 years to triple the performance of a calculator. The specific problem was determining whether a date-- 20140331-- is a prime number (this one is).

I keep a prime factorization program on the 9100 which is always there because, you know, CORE MEMORY. It took 59 seconds or so to figure that the only factors were 20140331 and 1, so it's prime. It took the 15CLE about 20 seconds.

Tim sniffed and timed the prime routine built into the HP Prime: 0.096 seconds. So it would be more accurate to say that HP has made a hand held calc that's 614 times faster than a desktop calc.