courtney@agc.uucp (courtney) (02/15/90)
I have just bought a Cyrix 387 coprocessor to replace a burntout 80387 in my 20 Mhz Dell 310i running Dell Unix V3.2 ( aka ISC?). I also have a Weitek 1167 coprocessor installed ( both purchased from Microway). My C compiler only supports the 387 and my NDP fortran works fine with the Weitek. Great. The problem : I write a fortran program that divides by zero and does a core dump. The compilation is set to use the Weitek. I run "sdb" to find out where the error is and the system crashes. Kernel panic and other stuff dumped to the screen. ( I really don't want to recreate the situation to describe in fine detail the nature of the system crash - I'd hate to disrupt the file system.) I take out the Cyrix and "sdb" runs as I would have expected. I had never experienced this problem with the Intel coprocessor. The question : Has anyone else noted any difference between the Cyrix 387 chip and the old Intel 80387? The Cyrix runs fast - but it's not worth a system crash. Bob Courtney Atlantic Geoscience Centre Dartmouth, Nova Scotia Usenet : {uunet}!dalcs!agc!courtney Internet : courtney@papa.ocean.dal.ca