Until I move away from the propeller chip entirely for my graphics, I will want to make my code run faster. I want more RAM free to store sprites and 3d lines, and I want better framerates.
I have always used spin for programming the Propeller chip, however I have recently discovered that Propeller C is now faster than spin. To be exact, for some programs it can be twice or even 5x as fast!!!
I got this data from here.
I think my program could have a decent increase in speed using propeller C. There are two caveats however:
- Most of the CPU time is spent in assembly routines, not spin code
- The communication bottleneck is (mostly) in the 115200 bps serial, not the spin code
To speed up the assembly routines I could overclock the propeller chip. This has been done. The propeller reaches about 100 Mhz on most chips if I remember correctly.
The communication bottleneck could be fixed by adding a SPI communication option. I must keep serial however to keep a certain level of backwards compatibility with my older versions.
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