[stylus02]

Originally Posted by Lex Nahumury

Stylus, are you using babelfish translation to communicate here in english?
I hope so because you don't make much sense in the context of this thread other then
sounding snobbish and annoying.

you have a delightful sense of humor. i really hope it's understood now.

[Lex Nahumury]

Originally Posted by stylus02

i really hope it's understood now.

perfectly

[Lex Nahumury]

Originally Posted by Max M.

... but "slooooow" (again may be just fine on >50MHz MCU - but still need extra care when being put into time-critical chains..

Max, in regard to ARM fp support and performance, it seems a few of the faster ARM
chips have build-in hw fpu. (well I'm sure you already knew that)
For example the LPC3180, very expensive and Cirrus EP93x, reasonable priced but there seems to be GCC problems with the Maverick Crunch fp hardware.
You were right, this can all easily become another major PITA
(as opposed to our beloved x86 fp support)
But then again, perhaps GCC softfloat code running ARM @200Mhz covers practicly all host application needs?

[Max M.]

But then again, perhaps GCC softfloat code running ARM @200Mhz covers practicly all host application needs?

I can only hope so. Eventually, though i'm programming with ARMs for a while now - i've never used FP there - so i can only guess.
By the way, did not you bump any info on how exactly long (in tacts or so) it takes for the softfloat to perform common operations (sin/log)? It would be quite handy to just calc a clue of how many of them one can have per a second on a particular MCU.

[Lex Nahumury]

Originally Posted by Max M.

[i]By the way, did not you bump any info on how exactly long (in tacts or so) it takes for the softfloat to perform common operations (sin/log)?.

I've found performance specs (in clock cycles and usec@xxxMhz) for some commercial fp library, but so far not for any free or GCC ARM fp lib.
I agree that would give some form off indication, but I think the best way to find out
is writing some actual code and run it on actual hardware.
Well, that should not be a real problem since many of those ARM boards are indeed relative affordable as well as available.

[Max M.]

btw. - quite amusing news
Creative started to license EMU8030 chip to third parties.
EMU8030 is basically a emu10k2 with build-in "MCU" (80186 - )
OEM - Chips - EMU8030
Curiously they position it as "MIDI Synthesizer".

[Lex Nahumury]

Yep, looks like it's geared towards stand-alone soundfont player applications.
I wunder if there is any demand for such 'ancient' technology these days.
Thanks for this amusing info.