Itanium Rising: Breaking Through Moore's Second Law of Computing Power

Floating Point Architecture

Floating-point calculations, which involve mathematical computations between numbers with large numbers of decimals, are done on a separate 'floating point' registry. In the Itanium processor's architecture, floating-point operations are performed with these registers as extended precision calculations. Since floating point can take advantage of 64-bits of precision, the Itanium processor has a natural advantage in handling numbers with a large number of decimal places, extreme amounts of precision and can reduce 'round-off' error, as discussed in Chapter 4's section on 'Early Adopters'. The 82-bit register design allows the Itanium processor to extend the calculations out to a much larger number of decimal places, ...