>>>>> "David" == David Jones <dej@achilles.net> writes:

>> I got a Sun FPA board. What the heck is this? I noticed it had two
>> big heatsink-like Amp parts on it. Anybody know exactly what this
>> thing is?  How is it used? And can NetBSD be made to work with it,
>> what is involved exactly with this?

David> This is a "Floating Point Accelerator" - a "homebrew" FPU that
David> Sun used before 68881's were commonplace.

David> NetBSD probably couldn't work with this too well.  m68k
David> binaries are currently built to assume the m68k floating-point
David> instruction set (as implemented by 6888x and '040/'060).
David> Software emulation is provided in some ports.  The bottom line
David> is that you'd have to re-implement the software emulator to use
David> the FPE, and 881's are around $40 if you can find them and work
David> much better.

	I don't know what their instruction set is, but I suspect he's
got a 'Sky' board.  If it's the same as the one I'm thinking of, it's
several orders-of-magnitude faster than the '881 for some of it's
functions.

Dave.

-- 
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|David Gilbert, PCI, Richmond Hill, Ontario.  | Two things can only be     |
|Mail:      dgilbert@jaywon.pci.on.ca         |  equal if and only if they |
|http://www.pci.on.ca/~dgilbert               |   are precisely opposite.  |
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