[sdiy] Slightly OT : Intel i960

[jbv]

> That the TRW1010/TRW2010 MAC? I believe that a company by the name of
> Logic Devices (not Logical Devices) is currently supplying a CMOS
> version of these chips.
> Regards, Mike

Yes, I discussed this option on this list about a year ago.

I tried to associated the Logic Devices chip with a Scenix SX
uC (on shematics only so far). It should work great, although
this chips are a bit expensive...
The other drawback is that LD offers a different chip for each
function (an ALU for add, a multiplier, etc).
A single chip / uC / uP would be better, especially if it handled
floating point operation (AFAIR their multipliers only handle
32 bits fixed point mult.).
As for my solution around a SX uC, the + and - are handled by
the SX (a solution that wastes several microcycles), the data
for the multiplication being addressed to the LD chip just like
an external RAM (or math coprocessor). The good thing is that
other operations / addressing can be handled while the mult.
is processed, allowing some kind of (limited) pipelining...

JB