MaverickCrunch
Floating point math coprocessor core
The MaverickCrunch is a floating point math coprocessor core intended for digital audio. It was first presented by Cirrus Logic in June 2000 together with an ARM920T integer processor in their 200 MHz EP9302, EP9307, EP9312, and EP9315 System-on-Chip integrated circuits. Plagued with hardware bugs and poor compiler support, it was seldom used in any of the devices based on those chips and the product line was discontinued on April 1, 2008.
Features
The coprocessor has 16 64-bit registers which can be used for 32- or 64-bit integer and floating point operations and its floating point format is based on the IEEE-754 standard. It has its own instruction set which performs floating point addition, subtraction, multiplication, negation, absolute value, and comparisons as well as addition, multiplication and bit shifts on integers. It also has four 72-bit registers on which can perform a 32-bit multiply-and-accumulate instruction and a status register, as well as conversions between integer and floating point values and instructions to move data between itself and the ARM registers or memory.
It operates in parallel with the main processor, both processors receiving their instructions from a single 32-bit instruction stream. Thus, to use it efficiently, integer and floating point instructions must be interleaved so as to keep both processors busy.
Hardware bugs
Five versions of the EP93xx silicon were issued: "D0" and "D1"/"E0"/"E1" and "E2", with major revisions to the MaverickCrunch core between D0 and D1 to fix its worst bugs. All have a dozen or more hardware bugs which either give imprecise or garbage results or clobber registers or memory when certain sequences of instructions are executed in a certain order.
The public source identifies “MaverickCrunch” as floating point math coprocessor core. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around MaverickCrunch, Floating and point.
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This entry incorporates text from “MaverickCrunch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.