An 80 MFLOPS floating-point engine in the Intel i860 processor

The i860 processor is a 64-b microprocessor with 1.02 million transistors. It has a 64-b external data bus and a 32-b external address bus. It is fabricated with Intel's CHMOS IV technology (a 1- mu m double-metal process). The die size is approximately 10 mm*15 mm. First silicon is functional over commercial temperature and voltage ranges with an execution speed of 40 MHz. The floating-point engine consists of a pipelined adder and a pipelined multiplier, incorporates a special hardware to support the dual operation instructions, and operates synchronously with the RISC (reduced-instruction-set computer) core to execute up to three operations per clock. Its high performance lends itself well to a numeric-intensive computation environment, including vector processing.<
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