Weitek 3167 is a high-performance Floating Point Unit for
Intel 80386 family of microprocessors.
The 3167 co-processor was packaged in 121-pin ceramic PGA package and
required a separate, so called Enhanced Math Coprocessor (EMC) socket to be
present on the motherboard. The 3167 used different method of
communication with main processor. All
80387-compatible co-processors
used I/O ports to talk to main CPU. The 3167 co-processor worked like
memory-mapped peripheral device - to provide instruction opcodes and
data to the FPU and to get the results the main CPU could write to or
read from memory assigned to the FPU. 3167 instruction set was different
from Intel 80387 instruction set, therefore all applications compiled
for 387 FPU didn't work with the 3167 co-processor. To take advantage of the
performance offered by the 3167, the applications had to be re-compiled
using a compiler which supported Weitek co-processor. Applications,
re-compiled for Weitek FPU did work faster than with any other 80387
co-processor, especially when the applications used single-precision
floating point numbers.
|
