Date : Mon Jul 5 16:18:08 1993 From : bsalter@acorn.co.uk To : All Subject: Press Release: Acorn releases FPA Acorn Releases Floating Point Accelerator Acorn Computers has released an arithmetic co-processor based on the Advanced RISC Machines Ltd Floating Point Accelerator chip - the FPA10. It will offer greater performance for the A540 and A5000 series of Archimedes computers and the R260 UNIX workstation. The FPA10 is a low power, floating point accelerator designed to interface with the ARM family of CPUs. It uses a combination of silicon and software to deliver a cost-effective level of performance. By implementing the frequently used instructions on chip and using a combination of both software and the chip for the less-frequent instructions, it provides a design tuned to the requirements of ARM Powered systems whilst at the same time preserving their low power features. The FPA chip fits into a socket on the A5000 motherboard and the A540 processor card which were specifically designed with the FPA in mind. In keeping with ARM design philosophy of low power, high performance processing, the FPA10 dissipates only 250mW as opposed to the more typical 1-3 Watts dissipated by co-processors used on other manufacturers' platforms. Software which makes use of the RISC OS Floating Point Emulator automatically uses the FPA once installed, with floating point performance increasing by as much as a factor of 50. Computationally-intensive applications that benefit from the performance increase typically include spreadsheets, CAD, image analysis, modelling and vector graphics packages. With the FPA, double precision calculations have an accuracy to 14 places of decimal whilst extended precision calculations are accurate to 18 decimal places. The FPA processor has a peak throughput of up to 5 MFLOPs (Millions of Floating Point Operations per second) at 26MHz and achieves an average throughput in excess of 3 MFLOPs for a range of calculations. Owners of early A540s and R260s may need to have a free of charge modification made to their processor cards. Customers should contact their dealers or write to Acorn Customer Services for guidance. In addition, RISC iX users will require an additional software driver which can be obtained by writing to Acorn Customer Services. The price of the Floating Point Accelerator costs #99 (ex VAT) and is available from any Acorn dealer. For customers requiring further information, a 62-page data booklet, covering processor schematics, programmer's model, instruction set and hardware/software considerations, has been prepared which can be obtained from Vector Services, 13 Dennington Way, Wellingborough, Northants NN8 2RL for #10 including postage and packing. ENDS _______________________________________________________________________________