[Coco] Am9511 Arithmetic Processing Unit Cartridge Pak for the Color Computer

[David Ladd]

Oh now this sounds nifty :D

Reminds me of the math boxes used on some of the arcade systems to help
with math on those.

Sincerely,
David Ladd
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On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 2:13 PM Don Barber via Coco <coco at maltedmedia.com>
wrote:

> Hi folks! I made another thing! You may remember my past crazy projects
> such as CoCo RSA and the CoCo USB Serial Cartridge Pak.
>
> My latest project:  I designed a CoCo cartridge pak for interfacing the
> AMD 9511 Arithmetic Processor Unit. When software is designed or patched
> to use it, it can speed up arithmetic operations like MUL, DIV, SIN,
> COS, TAN, ASIN, ACOS, ATAN, EXP, PWR, SQRT, LN, and supporting functions
> (such as fixed to float conversions) significantly. Programs written in
> machine language or compiled can see significant (50-70x theoretically)
> performance gains by using the pak, especially if the parallelism the
> chip enables is exploited.
>
> I've also made a patch for Color Computer 3 Basic to use this cartridge
> pak. Benchmarks show a 10x improvement for floating-point heavy programs
> compared to the stock Basic routines.
>
> I've released both open source; the hardware gerber files and the Basic
> patch are available at https://github.com/barberd/coco9511pak.
>
> This hardware design was difficult due to the complex timing
> requirements of the Am9511 (it was designed to be used with the 8080);
> please see the README on the github site for more details.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Don
>
>
>
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>