Tech Support > Computer Hardware > question about 32-bit interger arithmetic vs. 32-bit float arithmetic
question about 32-bit interger arithmetic vs. 32-bit float arithmetic
Posted by zhihang.wang@gmail.com on January 9th, 2006


I have a question.
Is the implemention of 32-bit integer arithmetic more complexity than
32-bit float arithmetic?
And which is more simple?
Perhaps 32-bit integer arithmetic is simple, but how much?

Posted by Michael C on January 9th, 2006


<zhihang.wang@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1136769471.721412.179510@f14g2000cwb.googlegr oups.com...
Integer is of course simpler.

Michael



Posted by Paul on January 9th, 2006


In article <1136769471.721412.179510@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups .com>,
zhihang.wang@gmail.com wrote:

Floating point has a mantissa and an exponent.
An FP multiply means integer multiplying the two mantissa parts,
and integer adding the two exponent parts. Normalization is needed
to fix up the decimal point location and make a final correction
to the exponent part. So yes, FP is more complex. You can see
someone's attempt to build an FPU here, which hints at the
operations required.

http://www.opencores.org/cvsweb.shtml/fpu/FPU.pdf (page 4)
http://www.opencores.org/cvsweb.shtml/fpu/verilog/

Paul