8.4. Floating-Point Arithmetic Instructions
The powerful “fused” multiply–add and multiply–subtract machine instructions, which use three source operands, can also perform certain simpler operations that have two source operands in other architectures.
A key design criterion of the Itanium architecture is avoidance of branch instructions. Single instructions can select the maximum or minimum of two operands, based on either signed or absolute values. These instructions can greatly reduce the need for short-range branching in searching and sorting algorithms.
Partial support for division and square root operations is provided through hardware primitives that compute limited-precision approximations for reciprocals and square roots, which can then ...
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