Halfpenny (British decimal coin) portrait the Queen wears the 'Girls of Great Britain and Ireland' Tiara. Annual number of coins released into general circulation (excludes proof sets) A decimal quarter-penny coin (to be struck in aluminium) was also proposed (which would have allowed the pre-decimal threepence to continue to circulate with a value of new pence), but was never produced. Halfpenny (British decimal coin) The British decimal halfpenny (p) coin was introduced in February 1971, at the time of decimalisation, and was worth one two-hundredth of a pound sterling. It was ignored in banking transactions, which were carried out in units of 1p. The
Decimal computer extended to wider formats and hence are now slower than using 32-bit or wider BCD 'tricks' to compute in BCD (see ). The x87 FPU has instructions to convert 10-byte (18 decimal digits) packed decimal data, although it then operates on them as floating-point numbers. The Motorola 68000 provided instructions for BCD addition and subtraction; as does the 6502. In the much later 68000 family-derived processors, these instructions were removed when the Coldfire instruction set was defined, and all IBM mainframes also provide BCD integer arithmetic in hardware. The Zilog Z80, Motorola 6800 and its derivatives, together with other 8-bit