On Sun, 7 Jan 2001, Miod Vallat wrote:

> > I honestly don't know, as I never had one, but it MUST be faster, or
> > else they wouldn't have sold it :-)  I'll try to find a day to go out
> > to my storage place and hunt though my wall of Sun manuals (I think I
> > still have them) -- there might be a Sun3 FPA board manual in there.
> 
> The ``Floating-Point Programmer's Guide for the Sun Workstation'' manual
> would be a good start.

Know offhand where I might be able to get a hold of one?  

> 
> Under SunOS, you would compile your program with -ffpa to instruct the
> compiler to generate FPA code instead of 68881 code. Then, it would, at
> runtime, open and mmap /dev/fpa to have access to the board. By reading
> or writing at several memory address starting from 0xe0000000, you would
> trigger the wanted fpa instructions.

Hmmm.  PIO access to it?  Now I'm *really* interested in finding out
exactly what it does.  It would have to be fast at *something*, to be
worth going thru that much trouble for it!

Would the _Programmers_ _Guide_ also have info about the other accelerators,
like the sky FFP, & FPA-2?

Now I have a bunch of questions I need answered!  Starting with just what,
exactly, does it accelerate; can it keep track of contexts by itself, can
more than one coexist peacefully, can different accelerators coexist...

I need to stop and write these down, so I'll be able to remember 'em when
I find the answers!  ;)

> 
> Miod

Bob