[Coco] Am9511 Arithmetic Processing Unit Cartridge Pak for the Color Computer
Richard Goedeken
Richard at fascinationsoftware.com
Sat Mar 11 22:20:08 EST 2023
That is super cool; I love it. If any of the hardware-builder people in the
community offer these for sale I will buy one. Otherwise if no-one steps up
in the next few months or year I'll build one myself.
Richard
On 3/11/23 12:13, Don Barber via Coco 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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