FPU Enabler – brings hardware floating point support to Omnia II/Acer M900/HCT Leo

October 4, 2009 | By Surur

Unfortunately it has often been the case that the modern hardware in our devices have many functions which are not exploited by the software.

Chainfire, who has been instrumental in bringing support for the GPU to the HTC Kaiser, has uncovered another function which should speed up our devices.

In this case several new devices have an Floating Point Units these days, a coprocessor that can speed up floating point (fractioned numbers) calculations. Devices that have an FPU include devices based on the SC6410 processor like the Samsung Omnia II/Pro and Acer M900 and Snapdragon based devices like the Toshiba TG01 and HTC Leo. However, Windows Mobile right now does not come with support for it.

With NuShrike, Chainfire has created FPU Enabler,an application that patches coredll in-memory and replaces some of the FPU emulation routines with actual FPU routines, automatically bringing hardware FPU support to all applications which need it,

Of course the software is still in an early stage, and has some rough edges, with not all functions supported and other caveats, best read in Chainfire’s post here.

They note what is really needed for optimal function is for is for Microsoft, Samsung, Toshiba, HTC, etc to simply enable FPU support in their kernel builds.

Compatibility notes

Samsung S3C6410:
Samsung Omnia II – main test device
Samsung Omnia Pro – untested
Acer M900 – tested and works
Acer F900 – untested
Acer X960 – untested
Qualcomm Snapdragon:
Toshiba TG01 – quick test done by cmonex
HTC Leo – untested

Read more here for the download and instructions for supported devices.

About Surur

Site Admin and Windows Phone enthusiast, he has been using Windows Mobile devices since before they were called PocketPC’s. He is currently sporting a HTC 7 Trophy.

Tagged software, windows mobile

rad

I don't have an FPU-equipped WM device on me (thanks for the wonderful hardware HTC!… =/ ) to test with, but from the benches, great job guys! Not fully up to the hardware's FPU potential yet, but a heck of a lot better than WM's software FP function.

Now in a situation quite familiar to WM users, we have a problem in which the lagging platform has caused all applications to lag as well (due to the lowest common denominator), so the unfortunate fact is that most native WM applications have been written to avoid FPU ops due to the miserable FP performance you see on WM. As a result, even with the hardware FPU support, you won't see noticeable gains in most apps (except cross-platform frameworks and such that may be FP-heavy and probably run poorly on WM today).

It's the same issue as with GPUs– today you can get a Toshiba TG01 with Snapdragon and its ATI Imageon Z430 GPU, which is almost as fast as the iPhone 3GS' GPU, yet there's nothing much you can do with it because most WM apps are written to be able to run on GPU-less 195 MHz TI OMAP-powered devices, and even OpenGL ES apps are written (at best) to target the MSM7200's GPU logic, which, at least in HTC devices, performs quite poorly.
NuShrike

Lol, ChainFire was not the instrumental guy who brought gpu drivers to the Kaiser … Just the guy who pushed it most publicly.

NuShrike

Thanks for the PR on this anyways, since I've been poking you in the Leo topic for a while now.

http://antivirusexpress.com antivirus express

Great post! Just wanted to let you know you have a new regular reader – me!
NuShrike

So continuing drama:
Clove Technology has held up my Acer M900 in repairs for 2 months cumulatively now, over at least 2 repairs sessions, where Acer would fix one thing and break something else on the mobile.

Clove has refused to give me an exchange, or refund, as the remedies dictated under the British Sales of Goods Act of 1979 for British traders after the repairs remedy fails.

If you would like to state how you feel about Clove singularly holding up the development of FPUenabler, please email them at sales@clove.co.uk.

Here's an example message:
""RM1001188267 told us that Clove Technology is holding up his Acer M900 exchange, or refund, is in violation of the British Sale of Goods Act 1979 for unreasonable amount of time and extreme inconvenience taken so far for the repairs. Under the Act, repair isn't the only option and Clove is enabling Acer to continue damaging the mobile instead of repairing it.

Clove is also singularly blocking the release of the FPUenabler driver that [you] are waiting upon for many months. [add what else you like to use FPUenabler for or what you think about Clove's actions].

Violation of such aforementioned Act is a huge negative mark on Clove's sales reputation, and severely impacts any future purchases by [you].""

Thanks.