Floating-Point Circuitry & Interface
CS 441 Lecture, Dr. Lawlor
To represent fractional values, prior to fast floating-point hardware we used to use fixed point
arithmetic, where you keep track of the decimal point's location at
compile time. Floating point allows the decimal point to move at
runtime, making it more flexible than fixed point.
If you need a review of floats, see these CS 301 lecture notes:
This patent provides a decent summary of a floating-point add circuit. The basic idea is usually:
- Shift the two input numbers so their decimal points line up.
- Add the shifted numbers.
- Renormalize the sum: count off zero bits until you hit a one, and shift significant digits up.
You can shift both
input numbers into huge fixed-point values (for example, a 32-bit float
can be shifted into a fx128.153 floating-point number), but it's much
more circuitry-efficient to shift the smaller number so it matches up
with the larger value, as we discussed in class.
Software Examples
x86 ancient (1980's) interface: floating-point register stack.
fldpi ; Push "pi" onto floating-point stack
fld DWORD[my_float] ; push constant
faddp ; add one and pi
sub esp,8 ; Make room on the stack for an 8-byte double
fstp QWORD [esp]; Push printf's double parameter onto the stack
push my_string ; Push printf's string parameter (below)
extern printf
call printf ; Print string
add esp,12 ; Clean up stack
ret ; Done with function
my_string: db "Yo! Here's our float: %f",0xa,0
my_float: dd 1.0 ; floating-point DWORD
(Try this in NetRun now!)
x86 newer (1990's) interface: SSE registers
movups xmm0,[my_arr] ; load up array
addps xmm0,xmm0 ; add array to itself
movups [my_arr],xmm0 ; store back to memory
push 4 ; number of values to print
push my_arr ; array to print
extern farray_print
call farray_print ; Print string
add esp,8 ; Clean up stack
ret ; Done with function
section ".data"
my_arr: dd 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 ; floating-point DWORD
(Try this in NetRun now!)