International Business Machines Corporation

K Michael Kroener

Silvia Melitta Mueller

Maarten Jakob Boersma

Petra Leber

Kerstin Claudia Schelm

Jochen Preiss

In a binary floating point processor, the exponents of each of the various types of operands are recoded into an internal format, by biasing the exponents with the minimum exponent value of the result precision ('Emin'), i.e., the recoded value of the exponent is the represented value of the exponent minus Emin. Emin depends only on the result precision of the instruction that is currently being executed in the binary floating point processor. The exponent computations are then performed in this new format. The underflow check for all result precisions is a check against zero and overflow checks are performed against a positive number that depends on the result precision. The exponent values are in a 2's complement representation, so the underflow check simply becomes a check of the sign bit.

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Ehningen, Germany

K Michael Kroener