Opac: A Floating-point Coprocessor Dedicated to Compute-bound Kernels

In many applications, the main part of the computations may be encapsulated in compute-bounds kernels. Achieving high performance on compute-bound primitives at a low hardware cost has became an important challenge. OPAC was designed as the basic cell of a floating-point coprocessor dedicated to the execution of compute-bound kernels. Due to efficient hardware mechanisms for controlling and sequencing a pipeline performance close to a floating-point multiply-add per cycle per cell is reached on applications such as solving linear systems, FFTs or correlations in a microprocessor environment.