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Don't waste money on a math coprocessor they said
- enriquto 3y agoThose were the gpus of the day. At some point, everything got integrated into the cpu. Will we see a similar reintegration any soon?
- wenyuanyu 3y agoPossible... The recent Intel Xeon Max with the "brand-new" AMX instructions and 64GB on-chip HBM memory could be an example[0]... [0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/processors/xeon/max-series.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/pro...
- mytailorisrich 3y agoA whole range of CPUs have integrated GPUs, but nothing on the high end. I think there are technical limitations re. die size and heat dissipation if we wanted to integrate a high end CPU and a high end GPU in the same package.
- Aromasin 3y agoPrecisely this. Most modern CPUs would be better called SoCs, with CPU/GPU/XPU cores all on a single package. If you want any sort of stopping power in terms of the number of cores or the clocking speed of said cores, you need massive amounts of cooling, hence why GPUs are sold as bulky PCIe cards.
- eru 3y agoI think the Apple chips are the highest end integrated CPU/GPU chips? Especially on the mobile site, and if measured in terms of price. They are far from the best performers, of course. They are meant to run on low-ish power, especially compared to a desktop or server chip.
- hyperionplays 3y agothe top spec RyzenG Chip is no slouch.
- antupis 3y agoIs the Apple Mx series about that?
- MBCook 3y agoYep. GPU is built into the same die as the CPU. Not the same package, the same die. You can see a (small) annotated die shot of the M1 here: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-vs-apple-m14-floorplans https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-vs-apple-m14-floo...
- ForOldHack 3y agoWow. This is interesting. It used to be everything had to be on die... then on package... and with recent architectures, multiple dies, multiple processes... things are again exploding.
- ForOldHack 3y agohttps://www.macrumors.com/guide/m1-vs-m2-chip/ https://www.macrumors.com/guide/m1-vs-m2-chip/
- bonton89 3y agoI've often thought Intel kind of ignored the discrete GPU market for so long because they just assumed they would eventually absorb those functions into the CPU like they did with everything else.
- devit 3y agoCurrent CPU vector instruction sets are as good as the ones on GPUs and they also have tensor/matrix instructions comparable to the ones on GPUs. However, usually CPUs don't have enough cores and execution units to compete with GPUs, because they spend the transistors on out-of-order execution, cache and other features instead. Intel Larrabee was the only attempt to actually make a CPU with a GPU-sized vector unit and they dropped it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- justsomehnguy 3y agowe are on the another iteration: wifi cards are integreted now
- ForOldHack 3y agoYou read the article which is cool, but Wifi was on chip set during the Centrino days, then WinModems ( blows chunks ), and now we have Wifi/BT/Audio/Kitchen sink on chip.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoAnd you didn't read the comment I was responding to. > Wifi was on chip set during the Centrino days Except it did not: https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Wireless-MiniPCI-Adapter-WM3B2100/dp/B002AVTDFA https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Wireless-MiniPCI-Adapter-WM3B21... > WinModems Which were just firmware moved to software > Wifi/BT/Audio/Kitchen sink on chip Yes, but no: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi >> The AC 9560 and 9460 family of wireless (Wi-Fi + Bluetooth) modules are the first generation of CNVi modules.[3] They are only compatible with systems running Intel Gen. 8 or 9 processor on adapted motherboards.
- smegsicle 3y agohttp://catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html
- rob74 3y agoI was actually hoping that by the end of the blog post, the mystery of why the game didn't run would be cleared up, but sadly it wasn't. Looks like it had trouble accessing the HDD - but why should HDD access for a DOS game running under OS/2 require a math coprocessor?! I have my own story of living happily without a math coprocessor for quite some time: from 1992 to 1997, I had an IBM PS/1000 with a "Blue Lightning" CPU which can be best described as a "486SX3" (25 MHz bus clock, 75MHz internal). Then I tried to run the Quake demo and found out that "real" 3D games need an FPU :(
- mobilio 3y agoI have similar experience DX4 overclocked to 120 MHz vs. Pentium running on 75 MHz Hint: Pentium FPU was faster
- consp 3y agoMy Retro-socket3-toy-unit with a P83@100 MHz is fast (40MHz bus), but the DX5x86@150mhz (50MHz bus) beats everything except in quake. Timings aren't that great for the memory but the synchronous PCI bus (and working PCI VGA card at that speed) beats everything you throw at it.
- mobilio 3y agoSame here - all DOS games was faster on DX4, but Pentium was so smooth on Quake.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y agoCarmack and Abrash optimized the heck out of Quake making use of a “quirk” in the Pentium where you can overlap integer operations and floating point DIV to eke out every last drop of performance. Unfortunately the trick doesn’t work on early AMD K5/6 nor Cyrix CPUs - although Cyrix CPUs probably had other more serious problems. https://youtu.be/DWVhIvZlytc?si=DBE9zpTLj_16-GAt https://youtu.be/DWVhIvZlytc?si=DBE9zpTLj_16-GAt
- sshagent 3y agoI still go back and play crescent hawks inception every few years. Love the game
- scruffyherder 3y agoI should do a tutorial on stealing the urban mech, and saving the chameleon!! It’s so much better with those 2 mechs
- ekianjo 3y agoI had Battletech on the Amiga (showcased in the video) and it ran much faster even though the Amiga only has a 7Mhz CPU...
- simonh 3y agoThat was probably down to having a Blitter, rather than mathematical performance. This was a memory copy function in one of the support chips (Agnes), that massiveky speeded up things like sprite and window movement and line drawing.
- galangalalgol 3y agoDid the a1000 have hard floating point? I know it had a great f18 flight sim that seems like it would have been difficult with integer math, but people do amazing things with integer math.
- kstrauser 3y agoNo, it didn’t. My first Amiga with an FPU was a 2000 with an A2630 accelerator card.
- wmil 3y agoThe early VGA chipsets were very slow. They also didn't have any of the sprite & tile features that Amigas had. On a generic 286 you could swap out the stock ISA VGA video card for a Diamond SpeedStar and the improvement was crazy.
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y agoThat was still true with VLB(VESA Local Bus) and later revisions of the Tseng ET4000 chipset. Which was what made the SpeedStars fly. (At 50Mhz! Harr!)
- bombcar 3y agocarmack and friends getting sprites to work on DOS machines was a technical feat. I think they used it for commander keen.
- Probiotic6081 3y agohjjjjjj
- 0x0 3y agoStrange error, why does it say "illegal instruction at ffffffff" but then the dump shows CS:EIP as 71a3:000056e5? Shouldn't the EIP part be :ffffffff or what am I missing?
- bcoates 3y agoYeah. Looks like the processor is in virtual x86 mode from the dump, maybe that causes weirdness in the OS/2 BSOD?
- CapitalistCartr 3y agoAutoCAD on a 386. With 8 meg of ram. No coprocessor, no AutoCAD. At least none of his trying to figure it out; it was cut & dried.
- achairapart 3y agoAutoCAD for DOS shipped at some point with a cool NASA Space Shuttle demo, I remember seeing it render (can't remember if on a 286 or 386) without a co-processor and it took several minutes, as each line slowly rendered on screen. The same demo with the same machine now equipped with a co-processor, it took just a few seconds. As a kid, I knew nothing about FPU nor math co-processors but that incredible speed bump had a long lasting impression on me.
- Animats 3y agoAutoCAD was supposed to require a math co-processor, but there were software co-processor emulators available which could, slowly, do floating point. That's probably what you saw. AutoCAD was 64-bit floating point (and sometimes 80-bit internally). Trying to do 80-bit floating point computations on a 16-bit CPU was painfully slow. Previous low-end CAD systems were 32-bit, and large drawings would have errors. That's why the Golden Gate Bridge drawing was a common AutoCAD demo. Zoomed out, you could see the whole bridge, and you could zoom in on the details. Big selling point. (I did some of the early AutoCAD ports. Not all DOS machines were fully compatible with the IBM PC. There were many 80286 machines which were mostly-compatible. Each needed its own software. Every display, mouse, and plotter needed its own driver. Autodesk had a big room in Sausalito with one each of everything they supported. For a while, it looked like the Texas Instruments TI-Pro was going to win, because it had a color display good enough for text. But it was an awful computer. No memory parity and bad parts. I had to compile everything twice and compare the results.)
- andyferris 3y agoOh man I used to love BattleTech on the '286! (Yes we had a coprocessor, doubt it mattered). I kinda wondered why no one made RPG games in the BattleTech universe? The MechWarrior series was fine, but there's so much plot and intrigue that could be explored in this universe, and just _existing_ as a human around all these big machines could be pretty intense.
- andyferris 3y agoAnother fun fact - I cut my teeth as a little kid hacking my BattleTech (Cresent Hawk Inception) save games in XTree-Gold. I can still remember the ASCII symbols and the rough layout of the save files. I'd max out my teams stats and skills, stick extra weapons on our mechs (they even programmed in powerful ones that weren't actually in the game) and mark the map as explored. EDIT: I even got so much money it would accidentally wrap around when you got some interest from the bank or whatever (it was some small signed integer type) and then you couldn't spend anything, lol.
- kebman 3y agoThis sure brought me back. <3
- h2odragon 3y agoI'd suspect PS/2 compatibility problems, or "old machine" problems like dust in the empty socket that no longer makes contact when the socket has been filled with the FPU chip. PS/2 systems weren't fully "PC compatible", there was lots of stuff they would have trouble with. They had different port ranges and the BIOS had some infelicities as i recall.
- scruffyherder 3y agoI used a lot of compressed air on the socket and it made no difference. Old DOS 5 ran fine along with OS/2 1.21. The upgrade to 6.123 went fine, it’s just something else weird . Sadly I don’t know if any other 386 fans to give this a shot
- freedomben 3y agoThis is tangential to the article and somewhat meta, but as I remember old video game cover art and ads (and seeing the pictures in the article), it occurred to me that we're finally at the point where (sometimes) the actual game looks as good as the cover art. That's a pretty remarkable achievement!
- patwolf 3y agoI had the Maxis game El-fish, and the part of the game where you'd breed fish was almost unplayable on a 486SX because the SX lacked a math coprocessor. I wanted a math coprocessor, but as a kid in pre-internet times, I had no clue how to get one. Maybe I'll try playing in dosbox and see what I was missing out on.
- h2odragon 3y agoTechnically, you had one on the 486SX, it was just disabled. Probably* As I recall the "co-processor" slot on those boards was another CPU slot, with an extra pin; and when filled it took over and disabled the original CPU. Edit: later 486SX may not have had FPU: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12109/were-there-486sx-revisions-without-an-fpu-on-the-die https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12109/wer...
- achairapart 3y agoI read many times that 486SXs were rebranded 486DXs with a defective co-processor unit, don't really know if it was rumors or just plain fiction.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoSeems perfectly plausible. CPU binning has been being done for years. Made an 8-core chip, but one core is faulty? Disable some cores and sell it as a 6- or 4-core chip. Chip won't run at the frequency expected? Sell it as a lower-spec CPU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning#Semiconductor_manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning#Semiconductor_...
- acdha 3y agoThere is some discussion here: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/lies-damn-lies-and-wikipedia/ http://www.os2museum.com/wp/lies-damn-lies-and-wikipedia/ My guess is that if there’s any truth to it that was early on before the process was fine-tuned. It’s hard to believe Intel would have tolerated a process producing that many errors since they could use the same die space to make more smaller chips.
- zitsarethecure 3y agoI remember the day I got my AMD 287 co-processor for my old Samsung 286. IIRC I ordered it from an ad I saw in Compute! magazine. At the time I had this book about writing fractals in C and I went back and recompiled all my code to use the co-processor instead of the emulation library that came with Turbo C, what a revelation. These days I only buy CPU's with math coprocessors.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago> These days I only buy CPU's with math coprocessors. ...is there any other kind anymore? Unless you work with microcontrollers, at least.
- foxyv 3y agoThat's a bit of a joke. It's like saying, "I only buy cars with an electric starter now!"
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoOkay, thanks, I wondered if that was the case but I wasn't sure I was reading it right
- kristianp 3y agoHuh, this reminds me my raspberry pi pico has no fpu, being a pair of cortex M0s. Maybe I should buy a recent teensy, which has the cortex M7 with an FPU.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rbanffy 3y agoI could never find x86 AIX anywhere. Does it work well with emulators?
- scruffyherder 3y agoLook for PS/2 aix 1.3 It’s not very stable, although I don’t know if it was a flakey processor
- ForOldHack 3y agoThere were 3 versions of AIX 1.3, One for the IBM RT, one for the PS/2, and one for the PS/2 RT co-processor(Crossbow). https://ardent-tool.com/AIX_1-3/ https://ardent-tool.com/AIX_1-3/ https://ardent-tool.com/AIX_1-3/AIX_Origions.html https://ardent-tool.com/AIX_1-3/AIX_Origions.html
- uptown 3y agoGood memories. I had a Quantex 386 DX 40 with a math coprocessor. I used to churn out 3D Studio images one rendered block at a time over hours and hours and hours.
- lacrimacida 3y agoAnd I remember downloading 3D rendered images from BBSes back when I couldn’t produce them myself, was a kid at the time and 3D Studio was way above my abilities or computer power, had an XT then an 286 AT. Good times
- johnklos 3y agoWhile playing around with modern NetBSD on a system with just 10 megabytes of memory, I ended up getting and adding an m68881 just so that I could remove the floating point emulation code from the kernel to save a few kilobytes. OTOH, who doesn't like to toy around with the power to do 100,000 floating point operations a second? ;) I do hope the author figures out the cause. The issue is an interesting one.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoThe best 386 was the 486DX because it actually ran everything the 386 was supposed to run :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I486#Improvements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I486#Improvements
- neilv 3y agoAt the time, you could also get a math coprocessor for the Apple Macintosh: https://ncsa30.ncsa.illinois.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/kogut_cray.jpg https://ncsa30.ncsa.illinois.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/...
- johnklos 3y agoThe person in that photo has a very Moss-esque esthetic ;) The m68881 and m68882 are very good FPUs, and m68882s have continued to be made all the way through at least 2012, apparently. I recently bought one that was made in 2012 with Motorola, not Freescale, markings.
- gopher_space 3y agoI remember running a software fpu on a Mac, I think to play a neat little game called Avara.
- ForOldHack 3y agoThe Mac Plus could take a 68020 Accelerator board, and mine came without a co-processor, so... I found a 68882 with a missing pin, and soldered one on. It worked like a charm. Wait... Apple SANE did not come out until the Macintosh II... OH! You made a joke. ok. a Cray-X-MP/48 is a math co-processor for a Macintosh.
- lproven 3y agoThe development of all the main CPU families from 1980s on went much the same way: 16-bit, discrete CPU, optional FPU, optional MMU. 32-bit, integrated CPU + MMU, optional FPU. 32-bit, integrated CPU + MMU + FPU. 32-bit, integrated CPU + MMU + FPU + L1 cache 32-bit, integrated CPU + MMU + FPU + L1 cache, on-package L2 cache. 32-bit, integrated CPU + MMU + FPU + L1 + L2 cache. 64-bit, integrated CPU + MMU + FPU + L1 + L2 cache. 64-bit, dual integrated CPU + MMU + FPU + L1 + L2 cache. That's about where it starts to lose coherency. There were dual-core 32-bit chips and so on. I'm also eliding changes in core design such as scalar, superscalar, decomposition into micro-operations, micro-op resequencing, etc. because: [1] it muddies the waters. [2] if people can't remember the difference between a 387 and a 487 then this will go way over their heads. :-(
- mrighele 3y agoMy father wanted a computer for doing CAD, so of course he needed a 387 beside the 386. From what I remember, unlike the 386, for which both Intel and AMD models were available, the 387 was produced only by Intel, which meant that the cheaper and more performant 40MHz AMD processor had not a corresponding FPU, so if you needed floating point operations you had to spend more money for a slower CPU. What he ended up doing instead, was to get a relative to assemble him a PC with a 40MHz AMD 386 and a 20MHz Intel 387. Surprisingly it did work, as long as one would remember to press the "Turbo" button to slow the 386 to 20MHz before using the CAD software otherwise it would crash. The rest of the software would happily work at 40MHz
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Narishma 3y agoIIRC you could have a 386 with a 287 co-processor.
- scruffyherder 3y agoYeah, although it was apparently really early 386 boards. I’m not sure how it would work electronically though.
- bombcar 3y agoIirc the FPU was basically a second processor that the first would send data to and get an interrupt when it was done (or similar).
- oaktowner 3y agoOMG I had forgotten all about the "Turbo" button. Great story, and thanks for the trip down memory lane.
- enobrev 3y agoI remember them well enough. But this is the first time I've ever heard of an actual use for it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vondur 3y agoI remember my first Mac lacked a math coprocessor. It was the Motorola LC68040, and it came with Quadra 604. I seem to remember it making Excel slow at doing some calculations. My next Mac was a PowerPC, I don't remember any of those lacking math coprocessors.
- krylon 3y agoI think PowerPC had the FPU builtin from the beginning.
- HankB99 3y ago> Well it’s been no secret, but OS/2 6.123 on my PS/2 model 80, is insanely unstable running simple MS-DOS based games (large EXE’s) Lost me here. I developed several systems based on OS/2 (both 16 and 32 bit) and don't recall this kind of stability issue. Different use case, I guess. I was using IBM's C/C++ tool chain and did some scripting in REXX, no big DOS games.
- Narishma 3y agoThe 6.123 version they're using is a pre-release version, either a beta or an alpha. It's not surprising that it isn't stable.
- scruffyherder 3y agoWere you using a 1986/1987 386? I know everyone has super rose tinted glasses when it comes to OS/2, but try it on period hardware, with what shipped in 1987. Its terrible. And yes it runs great on Pentiums or anything new under emulation as clearly the larger fault is 1987 hardware, namely the 386.
- HankB99 3y agoI don't recall the processor. I was using it on period H/W, and in at least one case it was an IBM PS/2 with an 8514 graphics adapter and writing to it using some graphics primitives. The only wonk thing I recall was that if I cranked up the compiler optimizations, it just drew lines at various angles all over the screen instead of the images I needed. IIRC there were a few cranky things about writing directly to the graphics but I don't recall problems otherwise.
- neilv 3y agoIt's not surprising that the PS/2 model 80 would have MS-DOS games compatibility problems, even if running PC-DOS or MS-DOS rather than OS/2. The Model 80 was one of the first-gen PS/2 systems (which tried to replace the original IBM PC's fairly open industry standard architecture with things like MCA). IIRC the Model 80 was also IBM's first '386 PC, though IBM had been beaten to the '386 PC (first by Compaq and Advanced Logic Research, IIRC). Also, for a long time, MS-DOS games didn't necessarily work out of the box even on more conventional PCs, and you might have to mess with drivers, IRQs, etc.
- ForOldHack 3y agoDon't ever believe them: I was taking Pascal, and had just switched from a Prime computer to a PC for a large program. I had to finish some major part over the weekend, so I went to my brothers house. He had a co-processor, and Turbo-87 was hell of faster, so back at school, I snuck into the physics lab w/ 8087s and programmed there. When I got my own machine a few years later, I went out of my way to get a 8087 turbo. Lotus 1-2-3 and Turbo pascal ran amazingly fast. Six years later I got a hand me down 33Mhz 386. Upgraded the ram, the processor to 40Mhz, and got the co-processor. (ITT 87-II) again, with the math co processor, amazing speed. Finally got a hand me down 486 to replace the 386, and KaChing! It was not a 486 it was a Pentium Over drive w/ co-processor. Got into AutoCAD at that time, and ... people in the lab were complaining that there were no co-processors. I could not tell them that it ran much faster on my machine at home because they would know where I got the software.
- gdubs 3y agoMy first computer was a Tandy 486sx from RadioShack. One day I brought home the book "Becoming A Computer Animator". It came with a disc containing a copy of TrueSpace. But I couldn't run it because it required a math coprocessor. My dad was not a computer person, so he was not very thrilled about us opening up this mysterious box. But, he agreed, and together we installed the chip. And the software worked! One thing that was amazing back then was the step-function of upgrading your computer. At that point in Moore's Law, big updates weren't at such a ridiculous pace as they became over time, so if you had a 486, you had a 486 for a while. But add a SoundBlaster card (or the AdLib card for us lower-middle class folks), and suddenly your computer came to life in a way you didn't realize was possible.
- afitnerd 3y agoOne of my first paid jobs was in the summer of my college freshman year, 1988, I did some consulting work for an insurance salesman. He had an ibm 8086 based machine and it was taking 15 hours to run an insurance estimate. I got him an 8087 math coprocessor and it reduced the time to about 10 minutes. I think it cost around $500 at the time. I made my first $50 in tech, an his business was demonstrably improved. What a thrill!