Floating point Arithmetic pipelines

Floating point computations are the finest candidates for pipelining. Take the instance of addition of two floating point numbers. Following phases are identified for the addition of two floating point numbers:

• First phase will compare the exponents of the two numbers.
• Second phase will look for alignment of mantissas.
• Third phase, mantissas are added.
• In the last phase, the result is normalized.

These phases are given below:-

                                            Arithmetic Pipeline for Floating point addition of two numbers