APPARATUS

摘要

A scientific processing unit includes apparatus for performing floating point multiplication operations with operands in binary coded form. The apparatus is constructed from standard multibit LSI microprocessor chips organized into a number of vertical slices. Each chip includes an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and a random access memory (RAM). The ALU's are used to generate a predetermined number of submultiples of a mantissa portion of a floating point number which are stored in the chips memories. The submultiples are generated by multiplying the mantissa by predetermined factors which correspond to the values of multiplier digit positions selected during the multiplication operation.