Re: Math chip

[nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <35508ade.0@news.pacifier.com>,
Ronald Clark  <ron@pacifier.com> wrote:
>Is there a Math chip fo the GS?
>and is it of any use like what program can use it and is it worth it?

   Math chip? No. Math card? Yes. The Floating Point Engine and a few
other cards that used a 68881 as a math chip were sold and offered a
speedup in some programs that did a lot of non-integer (floating
point) math-- like spreadsheets, etc. I believe that these cards are
only available used nowadays.

   As floating point math on the GS is so slow, most programs avoided
it whenever posible. Thus, the speedup is only in the few programs
that did need floating point calculations. If you're crunching numbers
all the time on the GS, then such a card might be useful. [But any
chip with a mathco onboard like a 486 and up, 68040 and up, MIPS R4000
and up is going to smoke such a GS in math due to that 1Mhz bus
slowdowns to addon cards.]

Nathan Mates
--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/      <*>
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