FULL FLOATING POINT VECTOR PROCESSOR WITH DYNOMICALLY CONFIGURABLE MUKTIFUNCTION PIPELINED ALU

A full floating point vector processor includes a master processing unit having DMA I/O means, a wide bandwidth data memory having static RAM and/or interleaved dynamic RAM, an address generator operative to provide address generation for data loaded in the data memory, a concurrently operating pipeline control sequencer operative to provide fully programmable horizontal format microinstructions synchronously with the addresses generated by the address generator, and a pipelined arithmetic and logical unit responsive to the addressed data and to the synchronously provided microinstructions and operative to evaluate one of a user selectable plurality of computationally intensive functions. The address generator, the pipeline controlsequencer, and the master processing unit are configured in parallel. The address generator includes means operative to provide pipeline input and output data dependent address generation. The microinstruction controlled pipelined arithmetic and logical unit includes two register files controllably interconnectable over feedforward and feedback data flow paths, a user selectable fixed or floating point format multiplier, a user selectable fixed or floating point format arithmetic and logical unit, and a sign latch coupled between the arithmetic and logical unit and one of the register files. The sign latch microinstruction control is operative to provide the arithmetic and logical unit with a data dependent decison making capability. A microinstruction controlled write address FIFO and a read address FIFO are coupled to the data memory.