Intel Corporation

Bruce W Ravenel, Iii

Stephen P Morse

James F McKevitt, Iii

William B Pohlman

Rafi Nave

John F Palmer

William Pohlman, Iii

The addressable memory space within the retrievable capacity of the microprocessor is necessarily limited by the bit length of the address word. This in turn, is limited by the bit length of the word which the microprocessor may compute or manipulate. By appropriate organization of multiple registers, an extended or expanded memory space may be achieved without the necessity of increasing the word length of the digital information manipulated by the microprocessor. In addition, the microprocessor can be fabricated to be capable of both eight bit and sixteen bit operation by appropriate organization and coordination of a plurality of register files. By virtue of this register file organization and coordination additional improved operations may be achieved, such as direct coupling by the microprocessor between the memory and separate dedicated data processing chips, simplified string instructions and the condensation of entire classes of instructions into single generic instruction formats.

Extended address, single and multiple bit microprocessor

A floating point, integrated, arithmetic circuit is organized around a file format having a floating point numeric domain exceeding that of any single or double precision floating point numbers, long or short integer words or BCD data upon which it must operate. As a result the circuit has a greater reliability, range and precision than ever previously achieved without entailing additional circuit complexity. Reliability is further enhanced by a systematic three bit rounding field, and by including means for detecting every error or exception condition with an optional expected response provided thereto by hardware. As a result of such organization, an unexpected increase of capacity is achieved wherein transcendental functions can be computed totally in hardware, and whereby mixed mode arithmetic can be implemented without difficulty. The numeric processor also includes a programmable shifter capable of arbitrary numbers of bit and byte shifts in a single clock cycle, as well as an arithmetic unit capable of implementing multiplication, division, modulo reduction and square roots directly in hardware.

Numeric data processor

Growing community of inventors

Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Bruce W Ravenel, Iii