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In the March 1988 issue, BYTE produced a in-depth section on math coprocessors for the PC. You can find a PDF and raw text scan of the issue at the Internet Archive; the section itself begins on page 223 of the PDF.

BYTE, March 1988, Vol. 13, No. 3.

BYTE, March 1988, Vol. 13, No. 3.

The article "Avoidng Coprocessor Bottlenecks" by Mauro Bonomi included a C program (PDF page 228) to demonstrate the improvements a math coprocessor can make to render a beach ball using Phong shading techniques in EGA (640x350) resolution. As noted in the article, it takes 8 minutes to render the image on a Compaq Deskpro 386/20 (20-MHz) using floating-point emulation, 28 seconds with the addition of the 80387 coprocessor, and finally, 10 seconds with the Weitek 1167.

The beach ball.

The beach ball

The C program was written for the MetaWare High C 1.4 compiler as it could produce output specifically for the Weitek 1167. Unfortunately, neither that version of the compiler or the Weitek processor are readily found.

The goals here are to:

  1. Reproduce the text of the article for online reading;

  2. Reproduce the original C listing;

  3. Clean up the C listing for compatibility with other C compilers;

  4. Update from EGA to VGA;

  5. Translate the C listing to Turbo Pascal;

  6. Create algorithmic versions in C and Pascal to run on machines without EGA capability;

  7. Use different compilers, languages, and hardware to produce benchmarks.