Cyrix Corp, Richardson, Texas is claiming the world’s first numeric processor fully compatible with the IEEE-754-1985 extended double precision standard, and 100% software- and pin-compatible with the Intel 80387 – but with up to 10 times the performance and power dissipation as low as 35mW at 20MHz. Cyrix rates the FasMath 83D87 at 5.5 MFLOPS peak and it attains its speed by implementing its floating point primitive operations in hardware rather than in a microprogrammed sequencer so that it can do simple floating point operations as fast as the 80386 can do integer additions. Square root, elementary and transcendental functions are correspondingly faster. It uses an 80-bit internal format for storage and computation and all 117 Intel floating point instructions are implemented, with computations performed to 91-bit internal accuracy. The FasMath is $471 at 20MHz, $585 25MHz, $773 33MHz for 100-up, now.
