7 Mar
2011
7 Mar
'11
3:49 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
What do you mean by 'hardware' multiply and
divide? A number of machines,
I suspect the 6809 is amongst them, had no particualrl hardware for
multiply or divide, but they did have multiply and maybe divide
instrucitons in the instruction setc. These instrucitons were implemented
by microcode using the normal registers and ALU. Does that count?
Yes, anything that includes a dedicated multiply or divide instruction as part
of the instruction set; I suspect a lot of the early implementations fall into
the "simple shift-add" that I mentioned due to the lack/cost of silicon.
cheers
Jules