Advanced flexible processor architecture

The Advanced Flexible Processor is a unique and powerful architecture providing an extremely high degree of flexibility and cost-effectiveness. It consists of 16 relatively autonomous functional units interconnected by a power 16 x 18 port, crossbar interconnect. Each of the data paths interconnected by the crossbar is 16 bits wide Table 1 describes the functional unit breakdown of the Advanced Flexible Processor. A conceptualized functional organization of the AFP is shown in Figure 4. 

Computations may be streamed through the Advanced Flexible Processor very efficiently due to dual I/O port characteristics of the internal architecture. Data elements may be independently streamed in and out of the Advanced Flexible Processor through any one or all of the four I/O channels. For example, data may be streamed in through one of the memory I/O channels, computations performed, and then streamed out through one of the other three I/O channels simultaneously. 

Multifunctional Parallelism. The internal architecture of the Advanced Flexible Processor allows multiple computational streams to be constructed and executed in parallel. By way of example, one might imagine the multiply unit requesting operands from one of the memory I/O ports and one of the data memories, while at the same time an adder may be requesting the product computed by the multiplier on a previous machine cycle and another data element from one of the remaining three data memories to serve as input operands for an addition operation. 

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