Algorithms for the Basic Operations

Among the many operations that the IEEE 754 standards specify (see Chapter 3), we will focus here and in the next two chapters on the five basic arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square root. We will also study the fused multiply-add (FMA) operator. We review here some of the known properties and algorithms used to implement each of those operators. Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 will detail some examples of actual implementations in, respectively, hardware and software.