Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!sun!cortex!rtrauben From: rtrauben@cortex.Sun.COM (Richard Trauben) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: hardware complex arithmetic support Keywords: FFT complex arithmetic Message-ID: <121828@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 16 Aug 89 15:20:20 GMT References: <1672@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <5858@pt.cs.cmu.edu> Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Reply-To: rtrauben@sun.UUCP (Richard Trauben) Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 13 >In article <1672@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP > (bill davidsen) writes: >>Why hasn't anyone built a complex FPU? This seems like a reasonable >>thing to do, in term of being common. > The "current/previous" generation of ATT and Texas Instruments digital signal processor (DSP) chips provide complex floating point arithmetic primitives to speed up the inner-loop multiply/accumulate butterfly operation of a fast fourier transform. Such things are essential for spectral analysis, filtering and pattern recognition (radar/speech). -Richard