[Coco] Am9511 Arithmetic Processing Unit Cartridge Pak for the Color Computer

[Richard Goedeken]

That is super cool; I love it.  If any of the hardware-builder people in the 
community offer these for sale I will buy one.  Otherwise if no-one steps up 
in the next few months or year I'll build one myself.

Richard

On 3/11/23 12:13, Don Barber via Coco wrote:
> Hi folks! I made another thing! You may remember my past crazy projects such 
> as CoCo RSA and the CoCo USB Serial Cartridge Pak.
> 
> My latest project:  I designed a CoCo cartridge pak for interfacing the AMD 
> 9511 Arithmetic Processor Unit. When software is designed or patched to use 
> it, it can speed up arithmetic operations like MUL, DIV, SIN, COS, TAN, ASIN, 
> ACOS, ATAN, EXP, PWR, SQRT, LN, and supporting functions (such as fixed to 
> float conversions) significantly. Programs written in machine language or 
> compiled can see significant (50-70x theoretically) performance gains by using 
> the pak, especially if the parallelism the chip enables is exploited.
> 
> I've also made a patch for Color Computer 3 Basic to use this cartridge pak. 
> Benchmarks show a 10x improvement for floating-point heavy programs compared 
> to the stock Basic routines.
> 
> I've released both open source; the hardware gerber files and the Basic patch 
> are available at https://github.com/barberd/coco9511pak.
> 
> This hardware design was difficult due to the complex timing requirements of 
> the Am9511 (it was designed to be used with the 8080); please see the README 
> on the github site for more details.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Don
> 
> 
>