CompuServe Messages

The only way an 030/882 combination can outdo an 040 is on transcendental (sine, cosine, etc) floating point functions, and that's only a maybe. The 040's internal architecture and cache designs make it run rings around 030/882 on everything else. Granted, transcendentals can be used for graphics, but there's almost always a way to write 040 specific code that will run much faster. And we don't use an EC040 on our accelerator cards, by the way. We do use EC030 on the 25 and 40 MHz 030 based cards, and a non-EC part on the 50MHz card. There are many other factors in the equation also. For example, with 16MB on our 040 card, burst mode is used, meaning the 040 can access 128 bits (4 long words) in one cycle which provides a massive speed-up. With some of the first 040 cards for A2000 we shipped the install script didn't do the MOVESSP option on GVPCPUCtrl and some users got disappointing results. Make sure yours does have this option enabled. MOVESSP moves the supervisor stack pointer to 32 bit RAM and ensures that every interrupt and exception vectors through 32 bit memory and not SLOW chip RAM. Hope this clears things up a little. Paul.