Re: FPE card

[GUDATH@EZINFO.VMSMAIL.ETHZ.CH (GUDAT,HENRIK MICHAEL)]

In <9501190536324186@wizardbaud.com> ryan.lanctot@wizardbaud.com writes:

> Didn't Applied Engineering make a 68881 FPE coprocessor a long while
> back?

Nope, it was a pretty silly "math" chip from NS. I have done some testing for
Symbolix's FP routines and found that this card rather is useless. It featured
only very few operations, and the acceleration on the GS was almost negligible.
(Loading the registers, doing the operation and fetching the result took about
the same time as SANE's own routines.)

OTOH, the FPE is a really cool piece of hardware. Calling the card directly
results in a up to tenfold increase in execution speed. However, the card seems
to have some synchronization problems and refuses to process anything unless
the program is resetting the processor.

- henrik