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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: FP: software vs. hardware (WAS: What should be in hardware but isn't)
Message-ID: <8756@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 11-Oct-87 21:01:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.8756
Posted: Sun Oct 11 21:01:08 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 11-Oct-87 21:01:08 EDT
References: <581@l.cc.purdue.edu> <8646@utzoo.UUCP>, <705@gumby.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 16

> If Motorola wrote good transcendental functions for the 68020, or for
> the 68881, if it hadn't had them in microcode, wouldn't that increase
> sales of their product enough to justify their effort?

Perhaps... but it's a substantial investment.  Given a standard format
for the floating-point, what's to stop other manufacturers using it to
boost sales of their chips too?

Motorola has in fact done roughly this, but has put the functions inside
the 68881.  Not only is it very difficult to read the internal microcode
to reverse-engineer it, the code is very 68881-specific and difficult to
adapt to other peoples' products.  This gives them the same sales boost
while keeping it all for them.
-- 
"Mir" means "peace", as in           |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
"the war is over; we've won".        | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry