Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!sun!cortex!rtrauben
From: rtrauben@cortex.Sun.COM (Richard Trauben)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: hardware complex arithmetic support
Keywords: FFT complex arithmetic
Message-ID: <121828@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 16 Aug 89 15:20:20 GMT
References:  <1672@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <5858@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: rtrauben@sun.UUCP (Richard Trauben)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 13

>In article <1672@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP 
>	(bill davidsen) writes:
>>Why hasn't anyone built a complex FPU? This seems like a reasonable
>>thing to do, in term of being common.
>

The "current/previous" generation of ATT and Texas Instruments digital 
signal processor (DSP) chips provide complex floating point arithmetic
primitives to speed up the inner-loop multiply/accumulate butterfly 
operation of a fast fourier transform. Such things are essential for
spectral analysis, filtering and pattern recognition (radar/speech).

-Richard