All Questions
Tagged with instruction-set floating-point
3
questions
4
votes
2
answers
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What was the first CPU/FPU without a hardware square-rooter?
The first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, ENIAC had a "square rooter":
five of the accumulators were controlled by a special divider/square-rooter unit to ...
- 19.4k
38
votes
1
answer
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How did the 8086 interface with the 8087 FPU coprocessor?
The 8087 has many instructions - too many, it seems, to be encoded as part of the 8086 instruction set. How did the Intel 8086 interface with an Intel 8087 FPU that a user added?
Consider the ...
- 2,005
8
votes
1
answer
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How can floating point addition be so slow on a BESM-6?
In the BESM-6 technical manuals — for example, in the ALU description, page 4 — there is a table specifying min/max/average instruction latencies in clock cycles (the last 3 columns; the ...
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