Comment by spankibalt
13 hours ago
Sadly, without an accompanying FPGA-implementation of an FPU it's much less useful for productivity work/research, i.e. outside of 08/15 gaming and application fare. Same with Ao486, which only implements a 486SX.
13 hours ago
Sadly, without an accompanying FPGA-implementation of an FPU it's much less useful for productivity work/research, i.e. outside of 08/15 gaming and application fare. Same with Ao486, which only implements a 486SX.
I think there are two reasons we haven’t seen an FPGA FPU yet, especially for MiSTer.
First, FPUs are complex and FPGA support for floating point is limited. There's DSP blocks for integer additions and multiplications. But very little FP support.
Second, the CPU itself may not be fast enough for an FPU to matter much. Quake wants at least a 75 MHz Pentium, while ao486-MiSTer is closer to a 486-66. So we probably need both a faster CPU design and a faster FPGA. Maybe Altera's new Agilex 5 will be useful here.