Octek HAWK 486, Manual

Page: 17 / 97

GENERAL
FEATURES
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2-7
Internal memory management unit provides a flexible
addressing scheme for the next generation operation system.
Multitasking, concurrent operation and manipulating huge data base can
be accomplished with excellent performance. Paging mechanism is
employed to allow powerful operating system to implement virtual
memory. Each segment is divided into several pages which are 4K bytes
per page. Page mechanism is transparent to software and allows
software to address 64 terabytes. Furthermore, the 64KB segment
boundary which is an barrier of 8088 and 80286 is removed and the
segment length can be increased up to 4GB.
The demand for sophisticated, number-crunching scientific and
business applications has rapidly increased in recent years. In the past,
microprocessor features an integer Arithmetic Logic Unit which only
handles simple integer operations such as addition and multiplication.
Floating-point operations which are actually utilized by applications must
be accomplished through software routines.
To meet the demand of floating-point calculation, a numeric
coprocessor is necessary. However, an external coprocessor has been
found to be the bottleneck of data transfer. 80486 integrates the
coprocessor on chip and thus the data transfer to external bus is
eliminated. The on-chip coprocessor is compatible with 80387. It
works parallel with other units in the CPU, which results in a better
performance of numeric process.