CompuServe Messages

Well it is advertised as the 040. I can't tell what it is since the thing is covered with a fan and a metal heatsink housing on top of that. Also, I believe (if I am reading the Motorla Programmers Reference manual I have in fornt of me correctly) there is no difference between the EC040 and the 040 as far as FPU. I believe what may be confusing is that when I look through the floating point instruction section, there is a table of directly supported instructions for the 040 family and those indirectly supported by the 040 (i.e. implemented in software). The on-board FPU supportdinstructions are badically add, sub mult and div, sqrt, negate (mul by -1) and some block move and test instructions. The larger "indirectly supported" instruction table lista all the exponential ops in base 2, 10 and e, logarithmic ops in same bases, all the circular and hyperbolic trig functions, and inverse trig functions – basically all the ops that get used for procedural textures and image map projections. After looking over this documnet I am of the opinion that the '040 is not the best chip for graphics oriented work. An 030/882 is almost as fast on these since the FPU can actually be working two FLOPS while the CPU is doing something else. So there is a paralellism that the '040 gave up that directly hurts math intensive operations like rendering. wmc – via Autopilot!