re why does apple give us a confusing message ubs carson u washington edu university bookstore writes bunt student tc umn edu monthian buntan writes does anyone know why apple has an ambiguous message for c regarding fpu in all mac price lists i ve seen every c has the message fpu optional i know from what we ve discussed in this newsgroup that all c have the fpu built in except the configuration why would they be so unclear about this issue in their price list i think this is mostly the fault of the people who write up the literature and price lists being confused themselves since there are two possible processor configurations and one of the them doesn t have an fpu it does seem to be an option even though it really isn t i m planning to buy the c cd pretty soon but i m now getting confused with whether it comes with fpu or not well then allow me to end your confusion the c only come with an lc in the base configuration if you are not getting this configuration then you are getting an fpu why say optional if it s built in good question i have been wondering that since feb th if you get the centris with cd configuration you are getting a mac with a rc processor that has built in math coprocessor support my understanding is that the optional fpu refers to your option of purchasing the centris without fpu or one of the other configurations with fpu this is possible but an option is something that you are supposed to be able to request when you want it what apple has done is given the buyer a choice between configurations and not an option apple does not offer an upgrade from the non fpu system to become an fpu system and it is unclear whether the processor on the non fpu system a lc can be replaced with a rc supplied by another vendor this is not unclear at all in fact apple has included in the roms of those machines with lc s code to recognize the presence of the full s fpu and use it thereby making the upgrade as easy as switching chips you pop the lc out and pop in a full apple did send a memo out at one point sating that the centris which only comes with a non fpu lc processor cannot be upgraded to support an fpu the pin configurations of the two chips apparently do not match so you cannot swap one for another again according to apple s memo they did i think i would double check this it has been stated countless times in this newsgroup by two of the centris hardware designers that the lc and the full are pin compatible and that the c can be upgraded to a full hades
