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12th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH-12 '95)
It Takes Six Ones To Reach a Flaw
Bath, England
July 19-July 21
ISBN: 0-8186-7089-4
T. Coe, Chinese University of Hong Kong
P.T.P. Tang, Chinese University of Hong Kong
The intial release of the Pentium processor has a flaw in its radix-4 SRT division implementation. It is widely-known that five entries were missing in the lookup table, yielding reduced-precision quotients occasionally. In this paper, we use mathematical techniques to analyze the divisors that can possibly cause failures. In particular, we show that Bits 5 through 10 (where Bit 0 is the MSB) of such divisors must be all ones. This result is useful in compiler-level software patches for systems with unreplaced chips; and we believe that the techniques used here are applicable in analyzing SRT division as well as other hardware algorithms for floating-point arithmetic.
Citation:
T. Coe, P.T.P. Tang, "It Takes Six Ones To Reach a Flaw," arith, pp.140, 12th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH-12 '95), 1995
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