NumberCruncher - Not So Good News

[dirk@gaga.maschinenbau.uni-dortmund.de (Dirk Froehling)]

Recently I made a survey about the NumberCruncher FPE-compatible floating
point coprocessor card for the IIGS. Five people showed interest or wanted
to buy a card.
I talked to Andreas Schmidt, who manufactured the NC, and he now has the
time to build a few more, but he has to build at least ten cards. This is
the minimum number of boards and custom gate arrays he has to order.
And the "mass production" of the ten NCs would be more efficient than
only five.
So I am afraid if there are not more customers than five, there will
be no more cards made. He still has three boards, but no gate arrays.

Just in case anybody doesn't want to miss this "Last Chance to See" and
gets interested now:

NumberCruncher features:

- totally compatible with the FPE from Innovative Systems

- much less sensible to heat, voltage problems etc.

- supports the FPE SANE patch for speeding up any program that does
  floating point calculations

- you can compile ORCA/Pascal and C programs to use the it directly
  with the special floatlib for the FPE provided by ByteWorks

- works in any slot (slot 3 & 4 without need for setting it to "Your
  Card")

- works with TransWarp GS and Zip GS accellerators and RamFAST SCSI
  card

The current price of a NumberCruncher card without 68881 is DM 250,-
plus shipping. If you already have a FPE with the copro socketed, you
can use it. You can use any 68881 or 882 in a ceramic package that runs
at least 10 Mhz. The NC runs at this speed (more is not necessary since
the slot I/O is the bottleneck). The price for NC+881 is not clear at
the moment,but you are probably better off getting the 68881 by
yourself. The current exchange rate is about 1$ = 1.50 DM I think, so
DM250 will be $167.

Dirk

-- 
| Dirk Froehling - Germany, Uni Dortmund, FB Maschinenbau, LS Mechanik |
| dirk@gaga.maschinenbau.uni-dortmund.de           GEnie: D.FROEHLING1 |