[comp.sys.mac.hardware] Floating Point Accelerators

sdd@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu (Steve Diamond x6584) (01/19/91)

I am doing some neural network processing, which involves a lot of
floating-point calculations.  I have seen a few floating-point 
accelerator boards advertised which claim to provide performance in
excess of 8 Mflops for $2-5K. Viewed superficially, this performance would 
put them in competition with one of the IBM RISC workstations, located down
the hall.  These boards allow the compilation and execution of
code entirely on the board, or execution on the Mac, with embedded function
calls to library functions on the board.

Does anyone have experience with any of these boards? Do they live up
to their performance claims?  Are they well integrated with the Mac
environment? Can existing code be easily migrated?
Is assembly language expertise required to
achieve those claims, etc?


				Steve Diamond
				Johns Hopkins Univ.
				Applied Physics Laboratory