I seem to recall that there was a Q-Bus interface to one of those old
external floating point add-ons (might have been the Sky box).  Good luck
finding one.  I also saw, once, a Q-Bus card that was claimed to have an AMD
9511 chip on it.  This was, I think, a custom job for the PDP-11.  I suspect
software float on the Vax would be faster.

Of course, the real trick is going to be getting the thing to do anything
useful.  The compiler won't issue instructions for the thing, so you
generally have to find or write a library.  This requires varying degrees of
effort to get right.


-----Original Message-----
From: Anders Magnusson [mailto:ragge@ludd.luth.se]
Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2001 6:42 AM
To: Paul.A.Duncan@soc.soton.ac.uk
Cc: port-vax@netbsd.org
Subject: Re: Maths Co-processor.


> Hi, I was thinking about the messages about IEEE maths operations.
> 
> Back when we used to use Sun 3/60's and the like there used to be
> add-an boards for the Sun's with either Sky or Weitek maths
> processors. Would it be feasable to make a QBUS card with a
> maths processor that main processor could call upon?
> 
This would probably be rather simple (DG had the same solution in 
their NOVA series) but I doubt the market for it is big enough :-)

-- Ragge