rsilvers@hawk.ulowell.edu (Robert Silvers) (01/15/89)
Do any of you have a "processor accelerator?" I mean one of those
$150.00 things that doubles the clock rate of your CPU. I would like to
know if you notice a speedup. I am most interested in Sculpt-3D. What
percent faster is it for Sculpt-3D? If you send me mail, I will summerize.
--Rob.
rsilvers@hawk.ulowell.edu _ _ _ __ ___ _ (508) 452-5000 Ex 2233
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"Only Amiga does not make it impossible"me128-aw@kepler.Berkeley.EDU (me128 student) (01/15/89)
In article <11229@swan.ulowell.edu> rsilvers@hawk.ulowell.edu (Robert Silvers) writes: > > Do any of you have a "processor accelerator?" I mean one of those >$150.00 things that doubles the clock rate of your CPU. I would like to >know if you notice a speedup. I am most interested in Sculpt-3D. What >percent faster is it for Sculpt-3D? If you send me mail, I will summerize. > > I would just forget about it. I have yet to hear a single good thing about the PA, except that it's dirt cheap. CMI will give you the results of their carefully tailored benchmarks (which Amigaworld magazine ate up), but if you do your own benchmarks you will find that any speedup will be MINIMAL at best. Almost all the performance increase of an 020 comes from the instruction cache and 32-bit memory, neither of which the PA has. The only thing sped up measurably will be the floating point, but the I/O driven 68881 doesn't compare to one acting as a real math coprocessor, as with an 020 or 010. Besides, the $150 dollar price doesn't include the '881. BOTTOM LINE: For $150, you can expect about 17% increase in speed. (Amiga Sentry Dec 88). I don't believe Sculpt uses the IEEE libraries, so paying the extra $100 for the 68881 will give you less than a 1% improvement above this. For 17%, I would recommend you save your pennies for a Hurricane board or Lucas board. By the way, I've built the Lucas board, and all I need now is the '020 and '881. Does anyone know a source for some experimental 12Mhz versions cheap? The board has cost be $125 so far. (Brad: if you're reading this, where is my second board I paid for?) If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, I would build this. If you have a 2000, it shouldn't be too tough to make some ugly adapter. -Vincent H. Lee