Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!columbia!rutgers!sri-spam!nike!ucbcad!ucbvax!sdcsvax!noscvax!marlin!aburto From: aburto@marlin.UUCP (Alfred A. Aburto) Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga Subject: Re: CSA Turbo Amiga Message-ID: <660@marlin.UUCP> Date: Tue, 7-Oct-86 16:46:00 EDT Article-I.D.: marlin.660 Posted: Tue Oct 7 16:46:00 1986 Date-Received: Thu, 9-Oct-86 02:25:14 EDT References: <2102@mtuxo.UUCP> Reply-To: aburto@marlin.UUCP (Alfred A. aburto) Organization: Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego Lines: 27 Distribution:net.micro.amiga I bought a CSA Piggy-Back MC68020/MC68881 bare board in May for $575. It runs at 7.16 MHz which is far below the MC68020/MC68881 capability but this hardware also provides outstanding performance. Total cost was about $900. It does a version of the SAVAGE Benchmark (coded in Fortran 77) in about 1.3 seconds while a VAX 8600 takes about 1.1 seconds. The Turbo-Amiga should clock in at approximately 0.6 seconds. While the Turbo-Amiga is by no means equivalent to a VAX it can certainly perform mathematical floating-point operations as fast or faster than a VAX. Its a good candidate to consider for an engineering workstation to offload the larger mainframe systems. Absofts Fortran 77 compiler with options for the 68020 and 68881 works very well with CSA's hardware. Manx and Lattice C will also, it is rumored, support the CSA 68020/68881 hardware. Quelo provides a 68020 Assembler and they are Beta-testing a version that supports the 68881 for the Amiga/Turbo-Amiga. TDI also claims to be working on a version of their MODULA-2 which will support the 68020/68881 Amigas. All-in-all things are looking pretty good for the Amigas which have been up-graded with CSA's 68020/68881 hardware. Not all software works correctly with the CSA Turbo-Amiga or the Piggy-Back adaptor boards. True BASIC for example crashes my system probably because it uses MOVE ,SR instructions which are ok with the 68000 but cause an exception fault on the 68020. Also Microsoft AmigaBASIC will not run with the Turbo-Amiga's extended 32-bit memory boards. It gets completely lost because (I quess) it assumes that an address beyond the 68000 24-bit range (up to $00FFFFFF) is an error. But the 68020 can handle memory addresses well beyond this range and the Turbo-Amiga memory boards are located at $7F000000 and above.