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for class on Tuesday Oct. 6, 1998
Please read Sections 4.6 through 4.12 of the Patterson & Hennessy text, and be prepared to discuss the following issues:
1. What would a floating-point multiply circuit look like? Let's make one in the style of Figure 4.45, which is a block diagram of a floating-point adder. An integer-style multiplier will be needed somewhere in the middle of our circuit; we will not work on the insides of this. Single precision, IEEE format. Your instructor is always a little shakey on rounding, overflow, and underflow; any help you can give him with this will be appreciated.
2. Famous Princeton guy John von Neumann is quoted on pages 312-313 of the text expressing arguments for and against floating point. A page of the 50-year-old document in which these quotes appear is either on the back of this sheet, or available by following this link; the relevant part is Section 5.3. What do you think of von Neumann's original arguments and why did he decide this issue the way he did? (And what are these ``scale factors,'' anyway?) Was he wrong? Was he wrong then?
