Hobbyist builds a homebrew Intel 8086 ISA accelerator card — maker’s project improves integer multiplication on these retro systems by 250%

A hobbyist named Brad has developed a homebrew Intel 8086 ISA accelerator card that significantly boosts integer multiplication speed on retro systems by 250%. The accelerator card is built around a TRW MPY12HJ parallel multiplier chip from the 1980s, which operates much faster than the CPU's microcoded multiply loop. This project aims to enhance the performance of early x86 systems by offloading MUL instructions from the CPU to the accelerator card. While the accelerator card is a remarkable achievement, it only accelerates operations for code that can be modified to utilize the hardware multiplier directly.