Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ncar!gatech!udel!mmdf From: CHUCHEM%BGUEE.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: (none) Message-ID: <6018@louie.udel.EDU> Date: 17 Dec 88 22:04:33 GMT Sender: mmdf@udel.EDU Lines: 56 > From: Julius A Cisek > Message-ID: <1391@leah.Albany.Edu> > > Processor Accelerator board from Creative Microsystems. Anyone have > this thing? It sounds great (AmigaWorld Jan'88 pg.19) but has anyone > actually used it for a period of time? Is it completely compatible, > is it reliable, etc. (Is there more than one version of AmigaWorld Jan'88 ?? mine has no such info on page 19!) I have had the CMI Accelerator for a couple of months. It is installed in a standard A1000 with a Microbotics Starboard 2Meg add-on. First of all, hardware installation was easy and straightforward, software installation was easier and the board worked immediately. My praises stop here. CMI did not supply any advice or software to demonstrate any gains in using their system. They did not supply any test programs at all. I could not notice any appreciable speed improvements in any casual applications. Running some standard benchmark programs I found that: 1. "sieve" benchmark ran in 64 seconds instead of 68.9 seconds. 2. "savage" benchmark ran in 59.8 seconds instead of 75.9 seconds. Interesting, but nothing to get excited about! I subsequently purchased and installed the MC68881 coprocessor and corresponding oscillator from a vendor whose leaflet was included in the CMI package. According to the promotional material, the board should speed up calculations considerably. (Especially things like "savage".) So far I have not been able to measure any speed improvement at all. The release version of the 1.3 enhancer is not yet available in this country, so I can't reliably say very much about operation with the MC68881. However I have tried operating it using gamma versions of 1.3. (My present versions say v34.4 for kickstart and v34.20 for workbench.) I have tried various combinations to try to get some sign of life out of my math accelerator. CMI supplied no advice on how to determine if the MC68881 is alive or not. For all I know mine might be brain dead. Does anyone have any advice on how I can get the math co-processor to show some signs of life? What can I check? So far EVERYTHING I have tried could not in any way coax any response out of the 68881. Other than what I've already described, the system seems to have no major failings. I could not attribute any machine crashes to this system. One strange thing that seems like it may be correlated to the installation of the CMI accelerator appears during warm reboot, when Amiga sometimes prompts for the kickstart disk. That's not good, but it is not terrible. Dave Chuchem chuchem@bguee.bitnet