Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!unmvax!indri!engr!wittmann From: wittmann@engr.wisc.edu (art wittmann) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: Floating point accelerator 98248a Summary: FPA doesn't seem to help much Message-ID: <112@engr.wisc.edu> Date: 15 Aug 89 12:58:29 GMT Reply-To: wittmann@engr.wisc.edu (art wittmann) Distribution: usa Organization: Computer Aided Engineering Center, UW-Madison Lines: 21 I just got a 98248a FPA for my 9000/360. Our EE department uses the circuit simulation program 'spice' heavily, so I recompiled spice to take advantage of the new FPA (using the +ffpa switch to cc). I ran a couple of test programs and saw about a 10% performance increase. So, two questions: 1. Has anyone used the FPA for such "real world" applications & what kind of performance increase have you seen? 2. Do I have to do anything else to get full use of the FPA (use other libraries when linking spice, that sort of thing)? Any comments appreciated, you can mail me directly at wittmann@engr.wisc.edu if I get enough response, I'll post a summary. By the way, the man pages mention the 68010 and 68020 as CPUs that the compiler is aware of, nothing on the 68030... seems odd. Art disclaimer: I disclaime!