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Author Topic: Need explanation of the CPU and FPU technology on turbo boards  (Read 13369 times)

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Offline KThunder

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fpu support was kind of like hd support back in the day but less critical. when a large percentage of amiga users had unexpanded a500s and a1200s or 2000s requiring fpu would cut out a large number of users and lots of potential profit.
68k cpus do integer math quite well so most programs could make do without fpu. libraries should use them though, if available.
iirc divide was the only 16bit math instuction the 68000 had (16bit divided by 16bit resulting in 32bit answer). many programmers especially demo coders and other assembly people used tables.
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Offline KThunder

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Re: Need explanation of the CPU and FPU technology on turbo boards
« Reply #1 on: November 25, 2006, 06:15:32 PM »
say you have an 64bit floating point calculation
(all numbers just for sake of arg)

68030@25mhz say it takes 100 clock cycles

say on a 68882@25mhz it takes 50 clock cycles (probably less)

now say the 68882 is running @ 50mhz it still takes 50 cycles but only half as long it lets the 68030 know the answer is ready in half the time.

thats why it is faster. most accelerators that i know of that have an fpu socket can run it faster than the cpu

several people have said that there is a prog which has an fpu version which is slower and hinted at why, please tell us why it is slower i dont have the docs
Oh yeah?!?
Well your stupid bit is set,
and its read only!
(my best geek putdown)