Processor; Superscalar Architecture; Floating Point Unit (Fpu) - HP Vectra 510 Technical Reference Manual

1 HP Vectra 500 Series
Principal Components and Features

Processor

The Pentium processor uses 64-bit architecture and is 100% compatible
with Intel's family of x86 processors. All application software that has been
written for Intel386 and Intel486 processors can run on the Pentium without
modification. The Pentium processor contains all the features of the
Intel486 processor, with the following added features which enhance
performance:

• Superscalar Architecture

• Floating Point Unit
• Dynamic Branch Prediction
• Instruction and Data cache
• Data Integrity
• Supports MultiProcessor Specification (MPS) 1.1
• PCI bus architecture
• Advanced Power Management capability for reducing power consumption
The processor is seated in a Zero Insertion Force (ZIF) socket.
Superscalar Architecture
The Pentium processor's superscalar architecture has two instructions
pipelines and a floating-point unit, each capable of independent operation.
The two pipelines allow the Pentium to execute two integer instructions in
parallel, in a single clock cycle. Using the pipelines halves the instruction
execution time and almost doubles the performance of the processor,
compared with an Intel486 microprocessor of the same frequency.
Frequently, the microprocessor can issue two instructions at once (one
instruction to each pipeline). This is called instruction pairing. Each
instruction must be simple. One pipeline will always receive the next
sequential instruction of the one issued to the other pipeline.

Floating Point Unit (FPU)

The Floating Point Unit incorporates optimized algorithms and dedicated
hardware for multiply, divide, and add functions. This increases the
processing speed of common operations by a factor of three.
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