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for class on Tuesday Oct. 3, 2000
Please read Sections 4.6 through 4.12 of the Patterson & Hennessy text, and be prepared to discuss the following issue:
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 at all. 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. As usual, you should do a sketch of your ideas as part of your preparation.