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From: jallen@eeserv1.ic.sunysb.edu (Joseph Allen)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Floating Point Risc
Message-ID: <1991Apr20.063947.12811@sbcs.sunysb.edu>
Date: 20 Apr 91 06:39:47 GMT
Sender: usenet@sbcs.sunysb.edu (Usenet poster)
Organization: State University of New York at Stony Brook
Lines: 20
Originator: jallen@eeserv1.ic.sunysb.edu


How's this for a risc processor:  No integer instructions at all.  Addresses
would be floating point too, but automatically INTed when presented to the
address lines (or maybe normalized floating point numbers themselves could be
used as addresses...).  There would be one floating point number per integer
address or 4 or 8 bytes per address (load byte at location 123.75).  When
bytes are loaded/stored they're also converted to/from floating point while
they're in the registers.  

The math people would love it :-)

Oh, plus many peripherals could use the floating point directly:  forget about
4G colors, have 4G colors with logmerthic intensity... Same deal with sound...
--
#define h 23 /* Height */         /* jallen@ic.sunysb.edu (129.49.12.74) */
#define w 79 /* Width */                       /* Amazing */
int i,r,b[]={-w,w,1,-1},d,a[w*h];m(p){a[p]=2;while(d=(p>2*w?!a[p-w-w]?1:0:0)|(
p<w*(h-2)?!a[p+w+w]?2:0:0)|(p%w!=w-2?!a[p+2]?4:0:0)|(p%w!=1?!a[p-2]?8:0:0)){do
i=3&(r=(r*57+1))/d;while(!(d&(1<<i)));a[p+b[i]]=2;m(p+2*b[i]);}}main(){r=time(
0L);m(w+1);for(i=0;i%w?0:printf("\n"),i!=w*h;i++)printf("#\0 "+a[i]);}