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18th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH '07)
P6 Binary Floating-Point Unit
Montpellier, France
June 25-June 27
ISBN: 0-7695-2854-6
Son Dao Trong, IBM Server Division
Martin Schmookler, IBM Server Division
Eric. M. Schwarz, IBM Server Division
Michael Kroener, IBM Server Division
The floating point unit of the next generation PowerPC is detailed. It has been tested at over 5 GHz. The design supports an extremely aggressive cycle time of 13 FO4 using a technology independent measure. For most dependent instructions, its fused multiply-add dataflow has only 6 effective pipeline stages. This is nearly equivalent to its predecessor, the Power 5, even though its technology independent frequency has increased over 70%. Overall the frequency has improved over 100%. It achieves this high performance through aggressive feedback paths, circuit design and layout. The pipeline has 7 stages but data may be fed back to dependent operations prior to rounding and complete normalization. Division and square root algorithms are also described which take advantage of high-precision linear approximation hardware for obtaining a reciprocal or reciprocal square root approximation.
Index Terms:
Floating-point unit, denormal result handling, aggressive data forwarding, high-frequency design, data processing without stalls.
Citation:
Son Dao Trong, Martin Schmookler, Eric. M. Schwarz, Michael Kroener, "P6 Binary Floating-Point Unit," arith, pp.77-86, 18th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH '07), 2007
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