On 02.05.02, 03:30:10, Greg Hughes wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mikel Waxler" <waxor@waxor.com>
> To: "HpcMIPS" <port-hpcmips@netbsd.org>
> Sent: Thursday, May 02, 2002 1:59 AM
> Subject: Sluggish Performench on a z50
> 
> 
> > Why cant my z50 play nintendo games? I'm using darcness to sdo the
> > emulation and its unplayably slow. xscorch is also pretty bad. I havn't
> > triend much else i nthe way of games. Net hack runs amazingly fast though.
> 
> Well, the processor in the z50 is a NEC vr4121 running at 133Mhz.  I'd say
> roughly equivalent in speed with a 66MHz 486.  So, pretty darn slow by
> today's notebook speeds.

What's also extremely slow is floating point; since the CPU does not
have an FPU, every FP command creates an exception that has to be
handled and the correct FP emulation software routine has to be
called. I found it to be magnitudes slower than Motorola m68040/33
when doing heavy floating point calculations.

I have not yet found out how to compile for software floating point
support (using direct library function calls instead of FPU commands).

> 
> - Greg
>   (greg@netbsd.org)
> 
> 

-- 
Bernd Sieker

NetBSD: Making your net work, and its free to boot!
		-- Steve Woodford