| I don't have accelerator, but my reading tells me:
LHARC would not use an accelerator; I have written Huffman encoding
routines, and they aren't floating point.
I don't not what ADpro is.
The bigest gainers in floating point accelerators are
rendering programs, but they must be ready to use the accelerator.
Either they must have dual versions (you used to have to mail away
for a special version of Sculpt 3D that would use an accelerator),
or use the IEEE libraries, which will figure it out on the fly,
whether the machine has an acceleartor and use it if possible.
DKBtrace does this (freely redistributable on fish 513/514).
I think the gain, depending on the clock rate of the accelerator
board you buy, is around 3X for floating point.
I have been looking into this, and unless I buy used, it looks
like 250-400 $, so I am postponing for now.
Tom
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| Floating point accelerators vary widely in performance, depending on
the chip and on the clock speed. Machines without them will end up
emulating the FP calculations using the CPU, and that is very slow on
a M68000.
whets020881 Owhets881 whets881 whets
68K: Amiga 7Mhz 68000 258
Amiga 68020 7MHZ (Midget Racer) 47
Amiga 2500 (14Mhz 68020/881) 23 81 49 118
Amiga 14 Mhz 68000 (CMI) na 58 80 288
Amiga GVP 68030/881 25Mhz 13 12 36 59
Amiga A2630 68030/881 ??
Amiga 25Mhz 68040 ~1-2 (estimated)
x86:
DECstation 425 (25Mhz 486) 3
MIPS:
DECstation 5000/200 ~1
As you can see, even a 14Mhz 68881 is about 10x faster than the "stock" Amiga.
The 25Mhz 882 is about 20x faster than the "stock" Amiga. From various
magazine articles, it's been stated that the FPU in the M68040 is approx.
10-12x faster than an 882 at the same clock speed.
That would put the 040s FPU at around 220x faster than a "stock" A500/2000
without any type of FPU. The talk on usenet is consistent with the
magazine results - the 040 really screams for floating point, and is
considerably faster than the 486 in this regard. And the 486 is certainly
no slouch.
If you're doing floating intensive work, consider an 040. Since time is
money, think of all the money you'll be saving. :^) :^)
Steve
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