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:
Nov. 11, 2008
Filed:
Mar. 31, 2008
Glen H. Handlogten, Rochester, MN (US);
Glen H. Handlogten, Rochester, MN (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
Systems, methods and computer program products for hardware assists for microcoded floating point divide and square root operations. Exemplary embodiments include a method including receiving a first microcoded instruction in the pipeline, decoding the first microcoded instruction in a decode stage of the pipeline, initiating a microcode engine coupled to the processor, with the microcode engine configured to process the streamlined microcode routine. During the delay between detecting the need to start a microcode routine and seeing the first microcode instruction actually issued, and using the processor cycle intended for the original instruction, hardware prepares for the microcode by pre-normalizing the operand, writing the pre-normalized operand to a scratch register coupled to the processor, conditionally generating a final result and discarding microcode routine instructions subsequent to the first microcode routine instruction and copying a final result from the scratch register to a floating point architectural register associated with the processor.