NEC SX4 supports three hardware floating-point formats

[David Hough]

The current Unigram states:

NEC Corp is claiming that its new SX-4 Series of scalable 
parallel vector supercomputers are the most powerful in the world 
- but don't all rush at once: deliveries don't start until 
December next year. The new SX-4 Series is offered in compact, 
single-node and multi-node models rated at up to 1 TFLOPS peak 
performance. Entry-level Compact systems are offered in one-to-
four processor configurations and are rated at 8 GFLOPS peek with 
64G-bytes per second bandwidth. 
 ...
All models support IEEE, 
Cray Research Inc and IBM Corp floating point data formats fully 
implemented in the hardware, NEC says. 
 ...


After all that effort, I would think adding VAX support as well would not
have been much more trouble!   I wonder if subnormal numbers are supported
in hardware, if division is correctly rounded, and if IBM extended and
VAX H format are in hardware?