Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Author Topic: Clearing up acronyms  (Read 4054 times)

Description:

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline biggun

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Join Date: Apr 2006
  • Posts: 397
    • Show all replies
    • http://www.greyhound-data.com/gunnar/
Re: Clearing up acronyms
« on: April 26, 2006, 05:32:46 PM »
Many years ago when you could put just a few hundret thousand transistors into a chip
it made sense to have two chips one for general computing (cpu)
and one extra for scientific mathematical stuff.
90% of the programs and people won't need the FPU and
could save money by not buying it.

Today an average chip holds millions of transistors so reducing
its size by a few hundret thousand transistors does not make any sense.
So today all mainstream CPUs include FPU and MMU.

MMU (memory management unit) is needed for virtual memory and memory protected.
FPU is used for scientifyc math. Today 3d games use it too.

Both FPU and MMU were optional in the Amiga days.
99% of all applications don't use them at all.

The 68030 was the first 68k who included the MMU.
The 040 and 060 both included MMU and FPU into the chip.
But there were low cost version of 040 and 060 (LC/EC) not including them.

Having an FPU will not speed up your normal applications at all.


Cheers
Gunnar