Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!aries!mcdonald From: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald) Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript Subject: Re: FPU for PostScript Message-ID: <1990Jan9.170357.25101@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Date: 9 Jan 90 17:03:57 GMT References: <1666@intercon.com> <17582@rpp386.cactus.org> <1990Jan9.044252.18617@ico.isc.com> Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News) Organization: Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Chemical Sciences Lines: 22 In article <1990Jan9.044252.18617@ico.isc.com> rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) writes: >woody@rpp386.cactus.org (Woodrow Baker) writes: >> >> AS to the benifits of a FPU, I am certain that the speedup would matter. > >I tend to agree with Tom, and while I haven't investigated it, I assume >that Adobe has. Intuitively, it seems reasonable; I'd think the down'n' >dirty work of the font rendering would be mostly fixed point. Probably a >lot of it is not numerical work at all. Still, as I suggest, I ASSume that >Adobe knows what they're doing. > >Woody - please submit some evidence that an FPU would make some useful >speedup in a PostScript controller. I don't mean your conjecture; I mean >some real evidence, or solid reasoning. Since, once again, you're trying >to tell Adobe that they don't know their business, the burden of proof is >on you. >-- Adobe's business is BUSINESS - i.e. profits, as is that of printer makers. Whether a FPU is worthwhile depends on how much more money it will make for them, and a faster printer might not sell enough more. Its complicated.