Decimal Floating-Point: Algorism for Computers
ARITH '03 Proceedings of the 16th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH-16'03)
Decimal floating-point in z9: an implementation and testing perspective
IBM Journal of Research and Development
ARITH '07 Proceedings of the 18th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic
Processor support for decimal floating-point arithmetic
Processor support for decimal floating-point arithmetic
IBM POWER6 accelerators: VMX and DFU
IBM Journal of Research and Development
Decimal floating-point support on the IBM system z10 processor
IBM Journal of Research and Development
A survey of hardware designs for decimal arithmetic
IBM Journal of Research and Development
Hi-index | 0.00 |
The IEEE Standards Committee recently approved the IEEE 754-2008 Standard for Floating-point Arithmetic, which includes specifications for decimal floating-point (DFP) arithmetic. A growing number of DFP solutions have emerged, and developers now have many DFP design choices including arbitrary or fixed precision, binary or decimal significand encodings, 64-bit or 128-bit DFP operands, and software or hardware implementations. There is a need for accurate analysis of these solutions on representative DFP benchmarks. In this paper, we expand previous DFP benchmark and performance analysis research. We employ a DFP benchmark suite that currently supports several DFP solutions and is easily extendable. We also present performance analysis that (1) provides execution profiles for various DFP encodings and types, (2) gives the average number cycles for common DFP operations and the total number of each DFP operation in each benchmark, and (3) highlights the tradeoffs between using 64-bit and 128-bit DFP operands for both binary and decimal significand encodings. This analysis can help guide the design of future DFP hardware and software solutions.