The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 03, 2001
Filed:
Oct. 10, 1998
Jerome C. Huck, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Peter Markstein, Woodside, CA (US);
Glenn T. Colon-Bonet, Fort Collins, CO (US);
Alan H. Karp, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Roger Golliver, Beaverton, OR (US);
Michael Morrison, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Gautam B. Doshi, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Institute for the Development of Emerging Architectures, L.L.C., Cupertino, CA (US);
Abstract
A floating-point unit of a computer includes a floating-point computation unit, floating-point registers and a floating-point status register. The floating-point status register may include a main status field and one or more alternate status fields. Each of the status fields contains flag and control information. Different floating-point operations may be associated with different status fields. Subfields of the floating-point status register may be updated dynamically during operation. The control bits of the alternate status fields may include a trap disable bit for deferring interruptions during speculative execution. A widest range exponent control bit in the status fields may be used to prevent interruptions when the exponent of an intermediate result is within the range of the register format but exceeds the range of the memory format. The floating-point data may be stored in big endian or little endian format.