tenny@iuvax.UUCP (09/01/87)
I saw an article this morning in the current issue of Computer Shopper which describes a NC4016 based coprocessor board for the IBM PC. The board costs $1,500 and is suppose to deliver 5 MIPS !! Grant it, these may be RISC MIPS, 11/780 MIPS, PC MIPS, etc. Does anyone out in netland have any more info on the NC4016...like maybe who makes it? Does it really deliver 5 (fill in your favorite reference point) MIPS?
mason@tmsoft.UUCP (09/04/87)
In article <36800001@iuvax> tenny@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu writes: > > I saw an article this morning in the current issue of Computer Shopper >which describes a NC4016 based coprocessor board for the IBM PC. The board >costs $1,500 and is suppose to deliver 5 MIPS !! Grant it, these may be >RISC MIPS, 11/780 MIPS, PC MIPS, etc. Does anyone out in netland have >any more info on the NC4016...like maybe who makes it? Does it really >deliver 5 (fill in your favorite reference point) MIPS? It is made by: NOVIX 19925 Stevens Creek Blvd.,Suite 280 Cupertino, CA 95014 It delivers 5 (they have chips that get 10) FORTH mips. I was working on a project that will be using a version of it. It is quite an impressive little 16 bit processor. There is a very complete Forth development environment (though if you're like me, this is a contradiction in terms). (BTW a Forth instruction is a Forth word, e.g. '4 3 dup + -' is 5 words and gives you 2) One of the nice things about the chip is that it does a subroutine call in 1 cycle, and returns are often included with the previous instruction. They have plans to go to 32 bits sometime, but the ideas that I saw that they had were pretty wasteful architectures & weren't going to increase the speed very much. The chip actually gets 1.25 instructions per cycle though (because some instructions do 2 Forth words (like 'dup +') so it runs at 8MHz for the 10 MIPS, and uses (I believe) 150ns RAMS, so could probably be scaled to 15-20 MIPS with current technology. Not bad! ../Dave Mason, TM Software Associates (Compilers & System Consulting) ..!{utzoo uunet!mnetor utcsri utgpu lsuc}!tmsoft!mason