Re: NumberCruncher - Not So Good News

[Michael Warner <Mikeal@rmci.net>]

Dirk Froehling wrote:
> 
> 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 |


Dirk,
	I bet we could get at least 5 or more people. A question also I'd 
like to ask is does it increase all grafics on the GS? Like the finder, 
Windows closeing, etc. I'll see what I can do locally with the GS users 
in our users group. I might be able to get a couple to commit to 
purchasing this card.
	Another thing once there are 10 + cards to be ordered how long 
would it take for him to be ready to mail them?
-- 
	 
						Thanks,
						   Mike :)
					GS and //'s FOREVER!!!
				  BUGGIE POWERED!!! Internally 3.5!