Floating Point Systems FPS-120B and Derivatives

Synonyms

SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) machines

Definition

FPS AP-120B was the first commercially successful attached array processor product designed and manufactured by Floating Pont Systems Inc., in 1976. It is designed to be attached to a host computer, such as the DEC PDP-11, as a number crunching accelerator. The key innovation behind this family of array processors is the horizontal micro-coding of the wide instruction set architecture with pipelined execution units to achieve high parallelism. Floating Point Systems Inc., later introduced several derivative products to 64-bit arithmetic and floating point calculations, by employing higher speed silicon technology, VLSI, and multiple floating point coprocessors.

Discussion

Introduction

Floating Point Systems (FPS) Inc. was founded in 1970 by former Techtronix engineer C. Norm Winningstad in Beaverton, Oregon, to manufacture low-cost, high performance attached floating point accelerators, mainly, for minicomputers,...