Floating-point processor

Given the ever increasing number of floating point processors, coupled with the need for better SNR (i.e., over 120 dB) might push the development of matching floating point converters. More work remains to be done. 

Simar et al., 1992] Simar, R., Koeppen, P., Leach, J., Marshall, S., Francis, D., Mekras, G., and Rosenstrauch, J. (1992). Floating-Point Processors Join Forces in Parallel Processing Architectures. IEEE Micro, 12(4) 60-69. 

The Intel 8086 or 8088 microprocessors could be used in conjunction with the Intel 8087 floating point processor chip (4) which is probably twice as fast as the Am9511A for on-chip operations and includes extended precision arithmetic in its instruction set. Unfortunately the 8087 was only laid down on paper, not silicon, when this work started. The 8087 is now (January 1981) available in sample quantities at a price far in excess of the Am9511A. In addition to the price and availability problem the instruction set of the 8087 is less suited to chemical computations than the Am9511A in that many transcen-... 

The estimated full commercial cost of an MVP-9500/8 system based on a Vector MZ with 5M bytes of disk space, printer and terminal is around 10,400, compared with around 25,000 for a PDP11/34 with similar peripherals and a floating point processor. This makes the vector processor option around eight times more cost effective than the PDP-11 PROVIDED THAT THE CALCULATION UNDER CONSIDERATION CAN MAKE EFFICIENT USE OF A VECTOR PROCESSOR. A similar comparison of the MVP-9500/128 and AP120B puts the former ahead by a factor of two in cost effectiveness. 

Also called the 387. A floating-point processor from Intel, 80387 was designed for use with the 80386 CPU chip. When supported by application programs, a floating-point processor can speed up floating-point and transcendental... 

Pentium The Pentium represents the evolution of the 80486 family of microprocessors and adds several notable features, including 8K instruction code and data caches, built-in floating-point processor and memory management unit, as well as a superscalar design and dual pipelining that allow the Pentium to execute more than one instruction per clock cycle. 

Hardware floating-point processor Performs with very high speed floating-point arithmetic operations and expands tremendously the computational speed of the machine. 

Time levels of graphics workstation have come into use over the last few years. The low-end systems typically have 2 to 5 MIPS of processor performance, numeric computing performance of 0.25 to 1 MFLOPS, and a drawing performance of 200,000 v/s and 2,000 to 5,000 p/s. Many of these systems were developed around the Motorola 68020 processor with a floating point processor. Since they are created from off-the-shelf components, they are relatively inexpensive ( 10,000 to 30,000). They are adequate when used for small molecule (250 atoms or less) calculations and interactive display. 

Arc-length continuation, steady states of a model premixed laminar flame, 410 Architecture, between parallel machines, 348 Arithmetic control processor, ST-100, 125 Arithmetic floating point operations,... 

Floating Point. Integrated floating point units first arrived as separate coprocessors under the direct control of the microprocessor. However, these processors performed arithmetic with numerous sequential operations, resulting in performance too slow for real-time signal processing. 

Papamichalis and Simar, 1988] Papamichalis, P. and Simar, R. (1988). The TMS320C30 Floating-Point-Digital Signal Processor. IEEE Micro, 8(6) 13-29. 

The TMS320C30 [Papamichalis and Simar, 1988] follows the basic architecture of the TMS-320 series. Unlike the DSP-32, it uses pipeline interlocks. Like the DSP-32, it features its own internal format for floating point numbers. Because of the four stage pipeline organization, it can perform a number of operations in parallel. It also features a delayed branch - something of a novelty in DSP processors. The TMS320C40 [Simar et al., 1992] has six parallel bidirectional I/O ports controlled by DMA on top of the basic TMS-320C30 architecture. These ports have been used for multiprocessor communication. 

Sohie and Kloker, 1988] Sohie, G. R. and Kloker, K. L. (1988). A Digital Signal Processor with IEEE Floating-Point Arithmetic. IEEE Micro, 8(6) 49-67. 

VAX 11-70 with attached Floating Point Systems Array Processor... 

Peripheral processors which are capable of performing floating point arithmetic operations at high speed are used to enhance the poor performance of popular general purpose minicomputers in this area. These devices are described in various ways but the following nomenclature will be used in this paper. 

Either of the remaining two options to be discussed would provide at least an order of magnitude increase in speed on the Am9511A and are much coveted by the author, but unfortunately they would require financial resources on a very large scale for development into useable floating point arithmetic processors. 

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