John,
Yes, Cyrix wimped out on the floating point, and I think that will render the
M1 uninteresting to 3DSers and CAD people.
That's kind of weird since Cyrix was originally known for its math co-processor
knockoffs.
I wonder why Weitek doesn't do a Pentium-beater? What we really need is a new
chip with a superscalar superpipelined x86/x87 core, and an additional totally
re-designed floating point unit on chip. The thing that hurts Intel chips most
on floating point is the archaic x87 stack-oriented architecture. If it
offered as much FP improvement as the Weitek Abacus chips offered over the 387,
then I bet Autodesk and other CAD vendors would support it.
Bailey
I agree totally. I just think chip makers have buisness apps on the brain too
much. Must be the fast that 99% of all apps don't need much FPU.
But I see FPU intensive software becoming more and more popular/important over
the next few years, and maybe the giants of PC CPU's will respond.
cheers,
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)