80-Bus News

Personally I think that the 8-bit micro has still got a lot of life left in it, and in many applications a switch to a 16-bit processor will bring little or no improvement. However, one area that can show a very marked increase in performance, is in those applications involving a lot of number crunching. The direct mathematical ability of microprocessors is limited, and anything but the simplest calculations have to be emulated in software. The 16-bit processors gain here by working with a larger word size which results in fewer steps to arrive at a result of similar precision. But even in this field the balance can be redressed with the addition of a separate number crunching unit.

The idea of a ‘bolt-on’ floating point unit to improve performance pre-dates the microprocessor, and in the micro field a few devices have been around for while. The early approach was to add a slave processor, though the current trend seems to be towards a co-processor. (’Slave’ and ‘Co-’ are my own definitions. Other people’s usage may be different.)

The co-processor is exemplified by the Intel 8087. This is a numeric processor specifically designed for the Intel 8088/8086 family to carry out high precision integer and floating point instructions. It connects to the data bus in parallel with the CPU and effectively becomes an extension of the CPU. The 8087 has a few direct connections to the CPU, and by monitoring these and the instructions being fetched by the CPU, it can track exactly the instructions being executed. There are certain reserved instructions in the 8086/8 instruction set that are specifically acted upon by the co-processor, while the CPU responds to the same instruction in a supporting role. (e.g. It may go on to fetch an operand from memory so that 8087 can capture it from the data bus.) The co-processor is far more complex than the CPU, and the volume of sales is not so high. As a result this is reflected in the price. A recent price list puts the one-off price of an 8088 at £16.80, with the companion 8087 at £173.30. (N.B. IC prices quoted here are distributors prices, NOT retail prices.)

The slave processor approach is different, although the end result is the same. Here an autonomous processor is built, either from discrete logic (e.g. using a bit-slice approach), or integrated directly on silicon. In this case the arithmetic processor is a peripheral, and not tied to any particular microprocessor. In use it is explicitly passed one or more operands by the master CPU, followed by an instruction of what it is to with them. (e.g. divide one by the other.) The specialist processor then carries out the task, and reports when it is complete, at which point the host CPU can read back the result. For the single chip implemenation there are two types of processor available, low cost or high cost:

Examples of the low-end devices are the National MM57109 maths processor, and the TMS1018. These are basically off-shoots of calculator ICs – ie. they are cheap, use 4-bit processors, are BCD orientated, and are slow. (The MM57109 will multiply two 8-digit mantissa, 2-digit exponent, numbers together in about 116ms. It is actually quicker to do the calculations directly on a Z80.) At the other end of the spectrum are the Advanced Micro Devices Am9511, Am9512, and the Intel 8231, & 8232. The AMD devices have been with us for about five years, and are custom designed NMOS 16-bit processors whose sole task is to crunch numbers. (e.g. dividing one 32-bit floating point number by another takes under 100uS – over 1000 times faster than the MM57109.) But with