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Re: Innovative Systems FPE...
Gust L Friedemann wrote:
Michael J. Mahon wrote:
Gust L Friedemann wrote:
sfahey wrote:
To: Michael J. Mahon
Re: Innovative Systems FPE...
By: Michael J. Mahon to comp.sys.apple2 on Wed Aug 11 2010 02:20 pm
> This might be a more interesting thing to do if there were
> more of them in use...
Weren't you contacting the fellow(s) that created the NumberCruncher?
Maybe he'd release everything, since it seemed the NumberCruncher was
a "more better" version of the FPE. I wouldn't mind having one of
these.. Did any part of GS/OS make use of these? Or was it completely
in-SANE?
I don't think I'm that fellow...though I'd love to know more about
the NumberCruncher. ;-)
http://www.asic.cc/NumberCruncher.html
That's an FPE-lookalike. In fact, aside from claimed higher
reliability, I don't see any capability that the FPE doesn't
provide.
In fact, it seems to be simply leveraging compatibility with
the FPE for its software support (SANE patch).
The e-mails on that page bounce, but after a little googlizing I found
Dirk's address. He says that Andreas only made about 20 or so- a looong
time ago.
I know that's not technical data, but it's something. Anyone have the
software mentioned on that above page? What did Chin-A-Youngs patch -
patch? I undersatnd it's a SANE patch, but was that a INIT ROM patch, or
just another on-disk-tool34 type of thing?
It just replaces the SANE tool with code that uses the FPE to
compute rather than pure software. There is no support for
applications or systems using other math routines.
I remembered reading a thread about the NumberCruncher not that long
ago... I thought it was on here. Maybe all this talk will bring out
whoever mentioned it. If my memory serves, at least. lol
The FPE patches only affected the SANE toolkit, nothing else.
There may have been a few applications that used it directly, but
I'd be surprised given their (actual) rarity.
I thought perhaps someone had perhaps made a low-level patch to use it
for... something under GS/OS. :)
That would be interesting. I doubt that any application was
sufficiently floating-point intensive to justify it. And I
*really* doubt that there were enough FPEs in use to justify
the programming effort.
The most likely user, it seems to me, would be a programmer with
a scientific application that they were writing from scratch.
-michael
NadaNet and AppleCrate II: parallel computing for Apple II computers!
Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon
"The wastebasket is our most important design
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