NORD-50
| NORD-50 | |
| Manufacturer: | Norsk Data |
|---|---|
| Form Factor: | minicomputer |
| Word Size: | 32 bit |
| Physical Address Size: | 4 megabytes |
The NORD-50 computer system is a completely integrated system of NORD-10/S and NORD-50 CPUs. The I/O system, file system and operating system are common to both processors.
The NORD-50 CPU was used in the ND 1100/S, ND 1200/S, ND 1300/S and ND 1400/S systems.
The NORD-50 CPU is designed to be a fast floating point processor which is a total slave to the NORD-10/S.
NORD-50 does not have an I/O system or interrupt system by itself, all I/O is done through the NORD-10/S which submits jobs to NORD-50 for execution in batches. The NORD-10 acts as a system supervisor running the operating system SINTRAN III/VS and the NORD-50 monitor.
In a NORD-50 computer system, the NORD-10/S has the following functions:
- Supervision and synchronization of the NORD-50s in the system.
- Running the operating system, SINTRAN III.
- Generating NORD-50 executable machine code via NORD-50 assembler or FORTRAN compiler.
- Being the I/O system for the NORD-50s performing I/O transfer to / from the NORD-50 memory.
The NORD-50s in the system perform execution of instructions with data supplied through the NORD-10/S I/O system from byte oriented devices such as terminals, general DMA devices such as disks and magnetic tapes, the universal DMA interface, and special high-speed DMA channels connected directly to ports in the multi-port memory system.
The NORD-50 can use multi-port shared and private memory and also static high-speed, private memory for frequently used code and data.
The NORD-50s themselves do not perform any tasks except for running the application programs.
The slave processor NORD-50 is activated by the NORD-10/S and NORD-50 executes programs in parallel with the activities in NORD-10/S. The NORD-10/S is interrupted when the NORD-50 comes to an end of its tasks.
To the NORD-10 the NORD-50 looks like any other device and is controlled via standard IOX instructions.
Contents
CPU
The NORD-50 CPU has a word length of 32 bits.
There are a number of registers in the NORD-50 CPU.
- 64 general data registers with register 0 always containing zero.
- The 64 general registers can be combined in pairs as 32 64 bit floating point registers.
- The lower 16 registers can be used as base or index registers for addressing.
Address space
The NORD-50 has 4 megabytes physical address space.
Circuit boards
Main registers and arithmetic, communication registers NORD-10/NORD-50, memory address and data lines, line drivers for external arithmetic are organised on three different boads, each handling four bits:
- 1501 Address Arithmetic
- 1502 Register
- 1503 Arithmetic Buffer
The 32 bit CPU uses eight of each board, making a total of 24 boards.
The timing and control section of the CPU uses eight different boards:
- 1500 NORD-50 I/O Control
- 1504 NORD-50 Controller
- 1505 Register Address
- 1506 Cycle Counter
- 1507 Arithmetic Control
- 1508 Chip Select
- 1510 Instruction Control
- 1519 Timing Control
