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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Time Traveler who wrote (24036)10/6/1997 8:56:00 PM
From: Petz   of 1573092
 
RE:How can you do a generic square root function in 5 FPU cycles?

Not as hard as you think. You can get within 15% by HALVING THE EXPONENT (a simple shift) and then taking (1-x)/2 as the estimate of the square root of the mantissa, which is between 0.25 and 1.0. Two or three iterations of a simple recursive formula (something like y=y-(x-y*y)/2 give you an answer accurate to 10 digits. The AMD K6, unlike the MMX or Pentium II can do a multiply, subtract and an integer operation like "divide by 2" or halving the exponent ON THE SAME CLOCK CYCLE.

Obviously you've never done microcode for floating point functions, huh?

Petz
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