Saturday 3 September 2011

Floating-Point Unit (FPU)

A  floating point unit (FPU) is a part of a CPU specially designed to carry out
operations on floating point numbers. Typical operations are floating point arithmetic
(such as addition and multiplication), but some systems may be capable of performing
exponential or trigonometric calculations as well (such as square roots or cosines).
Not all CPUs have a dedicated FPU. In the absence of an FPU, the CPU may use a
microcode program to emulate an FPUs function using an arithmetic and logical unit
(ALU), which saves the added hardware cost of an FPU but is significantly slower.
In some computer architectures, floating point operations are handled completely
separate from integer operations, with dedicated floating point registers and independent
clocking schemes. Floating point addition and multiplication operations are typically
pipelined, but more complicated operations, like division, may not be, and some systems
may even have a dedicated floating point divider circuit.

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