🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5120@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> oconnordm@CRD.GE.COM (Dennis M. O'Connor) writes:
>] 	... The only "complex" fpu op is sqrt...
>
>Sqrt is not much more complex than division, actually. Look at
>the manual procedures you were taught for each : very similar.
>I think I've seen array circuit designs that did mul, div and sqrt. 

The IBM 801 people mentioned in one paper that one reason they liked having
a divide-step instruction rather than a full divide was that a carefully-
designed divide-step could double as a sqrt-step.

The IEEE floating-point folks thought sufficiently highly of the utility
of sqrt, and sufficiently lowly :-) of its complexity compared to divide,
that it's a required operation for an IEEE FP implementation.  Looks like
the 040's FP box implements exactly what's needed for IEEE conformance,
in fact.
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