Comment by nanochess
3 hours ago
Wow! Thank you! The floating-point implementation in the Am29050 is really great as it ran in parallel with the integer unit. Sorry, I need to ask, maybe you don't remember. What happens if you write into gr2-gr63? Not really needed to know, but I've been curious the last 30 years.
The FPU in the 29050 was based on the Am29325 bit-slice family FPU; an extra write port was added to the register file to allow for asynchronous FPU result writeback, which allowed the parallel operation.
gr2 and gr3 were used in the 29050 for FP condition code registers, but otherwise I'm pretty sure accessing the rest caused a trap.
Amazing! I didn't knew about the gr2 and gr3 register. I just searched for these in the user's manual, very sparse documentation. Thank you!