🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1616@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E
Davidsen Jr) writes:

>  In article <48135@bbn.COM>, slackey@bbn.com (Stan Lackey) writes:
>  
>  |  The Alliant does fp in one cycle. In fact anything that uses BIT FP chips
>  |  that cycles even up to speeds of 20MHz or more can do it, provided the
>  |  operand passing is pipelined properly.
>  
>    Not having used an Alliant in several years, do they really do FP in
>  one cycle? Or produce one FP answer per cycle. Your pipeline comment
>  makes me think you mean the latter.

	If Alliant is using the same BIT parts we use (B2110A/B2120A),
yes the parts themselves complete every floating point operation in a
maximum of 50ns, excepting divide & square root. 

	To deliever that performance, Alliant & we & everyone else
must insure that operands get to the chips, and results get back to
memory/cache/register file; this data piping is the necessity for
pipelining.

	-mac


--
Michael McNamara	(St)ardent, Inc.		mac@ardent.com