Re: Best processors for trig?

On 2007-03-30, Mike Noone <nleahcim@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi - I was just wondering, are there any processors out there that
have been optimized for trig operations? I'm hoping to find a
processor that can do trig ops (sin, cos, tan, asin, acos, atan, etc.)
quickly.

The AN/UYK-44 CPU had built in trig instructions, including a
single instruction rectangular<->polar conversion feature. It
use an odd floating point format where the exponents were base
16 instead of base 2. And for extra fast angular stuff, it
supported a "BAM" type: binary angular measurement, where 0-360
degrees was mapped to 0-MAXUNSIGNED. That let you do a lot of
angular calculations very quickly using integer ALU operations.

The faster the better. I would really like to be able to do
such operations in the single digit microsecond range or less,
though that's probably a longshot. I'm looking for floating
point values - ideally in the C data type "double". Does
anything like this exist? Ideally in a non-BGA package, as I
hate debugging the little buggers.

And it was definitely not BGA. :)

It was a whole rack of SEMs: approx 2x5" "DIMM" style modules
(that were on ceramic substrates instead of fibergalss, IIRC).

All the computing power of an 8086/8087 combination, but neatly
packaged in a cabinent the size of a small refridgerator with a
5-digit pricetag and requring hundreds of watts of power.

http://www.usfamily.net/web/labenson/Computers16.htm#AN/UYK-44

Oh, and the software tools...

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