At the lowest level, the functional units are
largely conventional with some minor adjustments.
Their total capability is determined by the optimal
space they can take up, balanced with that of the state
storage blocks and the communication data paths. A
functional unit may require multiple micro-cycles to
perform an operation. The functional unit will
directly support basic operations such as logical,
integer adds, and permutation operations. It can also
provide partial operations in support of more
complex functions such as floating point arithmetic.
A floating point operation may be distributed across a
sequence of cells in a pipelined manner, each cell
doing part of the total function. A burton carries the
opcode(s) to be performed at its destination cell on its
target data and the control interprets and dispatches
on these instructions in response to the arriving
burton, where appropriate.