Introduction to 80x86 Assembly Language and Computer Architecture, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 9

Floating Point Operations

This book has concentrated on integer representations of numbers since all 80×86 microprocessors have a variety of instructions to manipulate integers. Most 80×86 microprocessors also have instructions to manipulate numbers stored in floating point formats.

The first section of this chapter describes the floating point formats used in the 80×86 architecture. Section 9.2 describes the floating point architecture, which has a completely new set of registers and instructions. Section 9.3 tells how to convert floating point values to and from readable formats. Section 9.4 describes the single-instruction multiple-data registers and instructions that provide an alternative way to do some floating point operations. ...