A NEW VLSI VECTOR ARITHMETIC COPROCESSOR FOR WORKSTATIONS AND THE PC - LANGUAGE AND PROGRAMMING SUPPORT

Language and programming support for the new vector arithmetic coproce ssor MIM XPA3233 is presented. In high-level programming languages lik e Pascal-XSC and C-XSC, the chip's functionality is directly coupled t o the operator symbols in vector and matrix expressions, or to the ope rators dotproduct or matmul in FORTRAN-90. Access to the coprocessor f rom other programming languages is achieved by calls to a special C su broutine library. Programming examples are given in Pascal-XSC and in C-XSC together with performance comparisons. Vector operations are exe cuted in the traditional manner using floating-point arithmetic and vi a the XPA3233 coprocessor chip.