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The Pentium contains a complicated circuit to multiply by three
In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. I've been examining the Pentium'...
To summarize, the Pentium's radix-8 Booth's algorithm is a fast way to multiply, but it requires a special circuit to produce the ×3 multiple of the multiplicand. The motivation is that the high-current inverters have fairly large transistor gates, so they need to be driven with high current (but not as much as they produce, so there isn't an infinite regress). Thus, this small piece of a feature is more complicated than an entire microprocessor from 17 years earlier, illustrating the incredible growth in processor complexity.
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