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   Account: Computers (pro@mu.zaitcev.nu)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Feb-2025 06:27:39 JST Account: Computers
   "Working with the CPU is the Arithmetic Processing Unit (ALU), which is responsible for mathematical tasks and is driven by the CPUs microcode."
   
   So close.
   
   Although, was there a CPU without microcode since the 8080?
   
   The original Narch didn't have any microcode, but I'm not sure if its successor "E2K" still didn't. Narch trapped to a software management whenever it wanted something microcode-ish. That was in 1997.
   
   I'm trying to remember if old SPARC had microcode (in e.g. Sun-4/280), and I cannot. It's been decades.
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     Account: Computers (pro@mu.zaitcev.nu)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Feb-2025 06:46:54 JST Account: Computers

     in reply to

     • penguin42
     @penguin42 Narch and E2K have a fully hardware FP, which inherits from Elbrus 3, modified for IEEE 754. But of course their gate budget was much larger than for pioneering RISC CPUs of the late 1980s.
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     penguin42 (penguin42@mastodon.org.uk)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Feb-2025 06:46:55 JST penguin42

     in reply to

     @pro I bet it was true of most similar generation RISCs like MIPS; Alpha (and ia64???) had 'PAL code' but that is closer to a modified machine code than traditional 'horizontal' microcode. I suspect most have it for FP stuff even on RISC, but integer probably doesn't.

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     Account: Computers (pro@mu.zaitcev.nu)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Feb-2025 06:46:56 JST Account: Computers

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     • penguin42
     @penguin42 Thanks. I didn't know much about ARM.
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     penguin42 (penguin42@mastodon.org.uk)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Feb-2025 06:46:57 JST penguin42

     in reply to

     @pro The ARMs didn't have any (I'm not sure if the current ones do).

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     Account: Computers (pro@mu.zaitcev.nu)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Feb-2025 06:47:10 JST Account: Computers

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     • penguin42
     @penguin42 It's the Boris Babayan's CPU that MCST developed when I worked there. It morphed into Elbrus 2000 (E2K).
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     penguin42 (penguin42@mastodon.org.uk)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Feb-2025 06:47:11 JST penguin42

     in reply to

     @pro what's Narch - one I've not heard of.