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From: jabernathy@pro-houston.cts.com (Joe Abernathy)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: FPE and a transwarp gs
Message-ID: <8910031316.AA12384@trout.nosc.mil>
Date: 3 Oct 89 09:48:33 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 44

Network Comment: to #652 by adm!smoke!gwyn@nyu.edu

I use the two together. I can tell you that my computer's extremely fast, but
just how fast is hard to say. Particularly where a math coprocessor is
concerned, you get into all kinds of subjectives ... what kind of work do you
do with your machine, how often does your work involve number-crunching, and
is the potential for time savings worth the considerable cost. The answer to
every question is different with every user.

The FPE speeds up things like spreadsheets, some graphics, and some things
that are really hard to measure, such as FOR loops in programs written in
certain compilers. The TWGS is a more broad-based accelerator, but as someone
mentioned, its acceleration in any one area of system performance is pretty
wimpy compared to the FPE. The thing is that the TWGS accelerators almost
everything -- so it is the first accelerator most people should buy. If you're
into fractals, or astronomy, or math, or anything similar, the FPE could well
be a better investment.

For amusement, I designed some loose -- very loose -- benchmarks to try to
compare my system's performance with other machines. I used the FPE, TWGS,
Multi-Kache disk accelerator w/SCSI option (getting an effective disk read
of about 10 ms), and caching. My GS is comparable to, if not a little faster
than, a Mac II, and it runs circles around an IBM clone 386 with a clock
speed of 20 MHz. Curiously, however, a IIe running with a 10 MHz Rocket Chip
is faster than my machine. (Actually, this isn't so curious. My tests were
based on the Finder environment, and there just isn't any IIe software that
takes up comparable resources to the Finder ... so there can be no valid
comparison.)

As for incompatibility between FPE and TWGS, there is. Applied Engineering did
the fix, and at the time I discovered the imcompatibility, they set a policy
of making the upgrade free of charge. Knowing AE, however, it would be worth a
call before sending in your card to see what the policy is today.

Another compatibility problem with FPE occurs if you try to compile programs
written under Micol Advanced BASIC. This problem arose once, was fixed by
innovative Systems, and then came back up under v3.0 of Micol BASIC. Somebody
is ignoring programming standards ... and at this date, the problem has not
been fixed.


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