SIMD Multi Format Floating-Point Unit on the IBM z15(TM)

The IBM z Systems(TM) is the backbone of the insurance, banking, and retail industry. Innovation in these markets is driving the demand for new and additional applications to better serve the customers. These workloads like machine learning, data analytics, AI, etc. require a rapidly increasing number of computations in smaller precision formats. With IBM z15(TM) we completely redesigned the binary and hexadecimal floating-point unit to efficiently implement SIMD operations at 5.2GHz while maintaining the industry leading reliability, availability and serviceability standard. This paper describes the new design and special techniques used to achieve these goals like reusing the existing double precision unit pipeline for lower precision parallel SIMD, new approaches to formally verify the design, and improving error detection for the 14nm technology node.