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:
Mar. 26, 2013
Filed:
Oct. 22, 2008
Maarten J. Boersma, Holzgerlingen, DE;
Michael Kroener, Ehningen, DE;
Silvia M. Mueller, Altdorf, DE;
Jochen Preiss, Boeblingen, DE;
Maarten J. Boersma, Holzgerlingen, DE;
Michael Kroener, Ehningen, DE;
Silvia M. Mueller, Altdorf, DE;
Jochen Preiss, Boeblingen, DE;
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
A floating point processor unit executes a floating point compare instruction with two operands of the same or different precision by comparing the two operands in integer format, which speeds up the execution of the floating point compare instruction significantly. The floating point processor now executes the floating point compare instruction at least twice as fast or faster (e.g., two clock cycles instead of five clock cycles in the prior art) for nearly most operand cases (e.g., 99% of all cases). Only the rare corner cases require additional operations on one of the operands and thus require additional cycles of execution time because the integer compare operation will not work for these corner cases. This is due to the fact that one operand is a single precision subnormal number in an unnormalized representation (i.e., has two representations) and the other operand is in the SP subnormal range such that the integer compare operation will fail.