CHERGR@lure.latrobe.edu.au (02/25/91)
A request for information about MC68040 accelerator cards for the new Macintosh LC or SI. I have a need for a machine for heavy number crunching of the Monte Carlo variety. An inexpensive approach to this problem appears to be a 68040 acclerator card for the LC or SI. There is some rumours of a company called Venture Tecnologies advertising in March MacUser but this will take a month or 2 to get here. I would like the address/telephone number of this company if possible. Benchmarks are another thing of interest. However an SI accelerator would be better since it would not be limited by the slow 16bit wide/16MHz memory and poor support for the standard Mac colour monitor of the cheaper LC. The other issue of course is compatibility. The obvious problem here is that the floating point unit of the 68040 does not support trig and transendental functions. Hence any such accelerator would have to be supplied with floating point function emulation via the F-trap mechanism of the processor. This is because my FORTRAN compiler supports direct calls to the 68881/68882 FPU. The info I need in any case is prices, names, addresses and telephone numbers. Thanks to anyone who replies.