18th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH '07) P6 Binary Floating-Point Unit Montpellier, France June 25-June 27 ISBN: 0-7695-2854-6
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ARITH.2007.26
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 Usage of this product signifies your acceptance of the Terms of Use. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||