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Published Articles >> Table of Contents >> Abstract
12th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH-12 '95)
p. 140
It Takes Six Ones To Reach a Flaw
T. Coe, Chinese University of Hong Kong
P.T.P. Tang, Chinese University of Hong Kong
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DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ARITH.1995.465365
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| Abstract |
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The intial release of the Pentium processor has a flaw in its radix-4 SRT division implementation. It is widely-known that five entries were missing in the lookup table, yielding reduced-precision quotients occasionally. In this paper, we use mathematical techniques to analyze the divisors that can possibly cause failures. In particular, we show that Bits 5 through 10 (where Bit 0 is the MSB) of such divisors must be all ones. This result is useful in compiler-level software patches for systems with unreplaced chips; and we believe that the techniques used here are applicable in analyzing SRT division as well as other hardware algorithms for floating-point arithmetic.
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 Additional Information
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Citation:
T. Coe, P.T.P. Tang,
"It Takes Six Ones To Reach a Flaw,"
arith,
p. 140,
12th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH-12 '95),
1995
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