Skip to Main Content
Itanium® Architecture for Programmers: Understanding 64-Bit Processors and EPIC Principles
book

Itanium® Architecture for Programmers: Understanding 64-Bit Processors and EPIC Principles

by James S. Evans - Lawrence University, Gregory L. Trimper - viika
April 2003
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
576 pages
15h 13m
English
Pearson
Content preview from Itanium® Architecture for Programmers: Understanding 64-Bit Processors and EPIC Principles

8.8. Approximations for Reciprocals and Square Roots

The IEEE floating-point standard defines requirements for the operations of division and remainder and for the unary square root function, including cases where source arguments are IEEE special values (zeros, infinities, NaN, etc.).

Some RISC architectures include full hardware support for floating-point division and the square root function; these operations take more CPU cycles than other floating-point arithmetic operations and thus tend to cause pipeline stalls.

The designers of the Itanium architecture took a different approach, utilizing lookup tables that provide approximations for reciprocals and reciprocal square roots, with known bounds on accuracy. These lookups execute in the same ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

ARM System Developer's Guide

ARM System Developer's Guide

Andrew Sloss, Dominic Symes, Chris Wright
Intel Xeon Phi Processor High Performance Programming, 2nd Edition

Intel Xeon Phi Processor High Performance Programming, 2nd Edition

James Jeffers, James Reinders, Avinash Sodani

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0131013726Purchase book