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From: SRFERGU@ERENJ.BITNET (Scott Ferguson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Vector Processors for ATBUS Apollos
Message-ID: <9006051503.AA10577@umix.cc.umich.edu>
Date: 5 Jun 90 14:52:51 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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I've been working with a Mercury Systems array processor, and have lost
company support for it unless I begin using it in an IBM AT (hah).
Therefore, I might possibly look for a new product, but can't justify
spending a giant amount of dough.

Does anyone know of a vector processor product that would work in a DN4000
with peak rates of, say 10-20 MFLOPS?

Does anyone know of a board which would use the Apollo's memory instead of
having its own on-board, therefore eliminating the bus transfer bottleneck?


My last array processor was very expensive (20,000) because it had 10 MBytes
of on-board memory. For image processing, you really need it. If I could buy
a board that used the regular system memory, it'd be really nice.

Are you apollo hardware folks thinking about implementing a board with the
Intel i860 vector unit? It's really cheap & easy to implement I've been told,
and being a purely scalar architecture, your low-end machines could really
use a boost. Give 'em a longer product life (although that's not in line
with Marketing's goals).

Also, what kind of FLOPS could I expect from using a floating-point accelerator
with the vec_$ system calls? My vector board is fast, but the memory transfers
ruin the performance. If a scalar fpa board can perform reasonably well and
have no transfer bottlenecks, maybe I'll resort to that.

Thanks,
Scott Ferguson
srfergu@erenj.bitnet