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!