2 Jul
2012
2 Jul
'12
8:56 p.m.
On 2 Jul 2012 at 22:28, Dave McGuire wrote:
That would be fantastic. And if my embedded
(typically industrial
control and communications) code is ever ported to any of those, I'll
be doing some editing!
Well, the NEC V-series did have instructions for variable-length
packed BCD add/subtract/compare up to 254 digits, but sadly, no
multiply/divide. So it's not that far from current architectures.
At least one company (http://www.silminds.com/) specializes in
decimal add-ons to existing architectures and decimal IP cores. Must
be some money there...
The STAR-100 had BCD add/subtract/multiply/divide of packed decimal
numbers up to 65Kbytes in length (that's 2 digits per byte). To
date, it's the only hardware that I've seen that carried BCD
arithmetic to such lengths. Enough even for the most ambitious hedge
fund manager...
--Chuck