Hewlett Packard Hp 1000 A-Series Computer Silicon On Saphire Floating Point Set
$ 42.24
Description
HEWLETT PACKARD HP 1000 A-SERIES COMPUTER SILICON ON SAPHIRE FLOATING POINT SET. The product is a vintage Hewlett Packard HP 1000 A-Series computer Silicon on Sapphire floating point chip set. The FPA was based on three custom chips HP designed. They are made on HP’s 4 micron SoS CMOS process and combined contain over 130,000 transistors. The 1AE7 FP ALU (30,000 transistors), the 1AH7 FP Divider (35,000 Transistors) and the 1AH4 FP Multiplier (60,000 Transistors). These chips together could handle 32-bit single precision and 64-bit double precision math, Hardware Floating point was not common in 1982. Intel had just released the 8087 for the MCS-86 but it was not widely available, nor was it particularly fast. At 5MHz it took 19 microseconds to do a FMUL, about the same speed as the A700 could do it in firmware (the 8086 without the 8087 took 1600 microseconds, no competition at all). By comparison the 8087 had only 45,000 transistors, while the A700 FPU had over 130,000. The A700 FPA also allowed for 112-bit intermediate productions, while the 8087 limited these to 80-bits. A note on HP part numbers. The set above has a 1AH4-6200 FPMUL. 1AH4 denotes the technology and the part. 1A denotes it is Silicon-On-Sapphire device, 1T or 1S would be a standard NMOS or CMOS device. The second half of the part number denotes the package and revision. In this case 6200 is the original design (00) in a PGA package (62). A later revision FPMUL would be 1AH4-6201 6202 or 6203. If another package was available it would be marked 1AH4-6000 (for a CLCC for example) or 6100 for a DIP.
