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EC8552 COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE UNIT II: ARITHMETIC OPERATIONS

UNIT II ARITHMETIC OPERATIONS

ALU - Addition and subtraction – Multiplication – Division – Floating Point operations –
Subword parallelism.

1. What is meant by Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU)?

It is the brain of the computer, the device that performs the arithmetic operations like addition,
subtraction, Multiplication and division or logical operation like OR,AND,NOT, and EX-OR
2. What is the basic hardware used to construct ALU?
Four basic hardware components such as
AND gates
OR Gates
Inverters
Multiplexers
3. What are the design classifications of ALU?
Based on the design ALU can be classified into Two Types
– Combinational Logic Circuits
– Sequential Logic Circuits
4. What is meant by overflow?
It is a condition, occurred when adding two positive numbers, the result will be negative and
adding two negative numbers will produce the positive result
5. How many kinds of addition performed on binary numbers?
– Unsigned binary Numbers
– Signed Binary Numbers
6. How the sign of binary numbers can be represented?
In binary number to represent the sign the least significant bit is used. If MSB is 0, the number is
positive and if MSB is 1, then the number is called negative number.
Example:
01101 = +13
11001 = -9

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EC8552 COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE UNIT II: ARITHMETIC OPERATIONS

7. When overflow occurs in addition and Subtraction?

Addition: If two operands having same sign it will cause the overflow in Addition process
Subtraction: If two operands having same sign it does not cause the overflow in addition
operation
8. Write the MIPS instruction for multiplication.
MIPS has two instructions to produce a proper product for signed and unsigned numbers such as
 multiply (mult)
 multiply unsigned (multu)
9. What is meant by floating point number?
If' a number having fractional point that is called a floating point number.
Example:
 4.982 - > decimal floating point number
 1001.0111 - > binary floating point number
10. What is meant by scientific notation?
 Scientific notation is a representation for real number.
 A number in scientific notation has no leading O's called a normalized number.
11. What are the advantages of scientific notation?
 It simplifies exchange of data that includes floating point numbers .
 It simplifies the floating point arithmetic algorithm to know that numbers will always be
in this form .
 It increases the accuracy of the numbers that can be stored in word.
12. Write the representation for floating point number.
Floating point can be represented using the following form: (1) SF 2 E
Where
 S - sign of the floating point number (O-negative, I-positive)
 F - fraction field
 E - Involves value

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EC8552 COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE UNIT II: ARITHMETIC OPERATIONS

13. Define overflow in floating point representation.

Overflow is a situation in which a positive exponent becomes too large to fit in the exponent
field.
14. Define underflow in floating point representation.
Under flow is a situation in which a negative exponent becomes too large to fit in the exponent
field. Overflow and underflow occurs in floating point arithmetic.
15. What is meant by IEEE 754 floating point standards?
 IEEE 754 is a standard used to represent the floating point.
 It has some special features.
 It has special symbols to represent unusual events (∞).
 It has symbols for the result of invalid operations (NaN).
16. Write the advantages and disadvantages of floating point.
Advantages
 Floating point has separate registers.
 Register bandwidth is high
 More bits can be stored in the instruction format.
Disadvantages
 It must have separate set of data transfer instructions.
 Floating point has separate register that increase the number of instructions needed to
execute a program.
17. What is meant by guard and round?
Floating point does not produce accurate result so, IEEE 754 always keeps two. Extra bits on the
right during intermediate additions, called guard and round.
Guard: The first of two extra bits kept on the right during intermediate calculations of floating
point format.
Round: It is a method to make the intermediate floating point result fit the floating point format.
18. What is a sticky bit?
It is a bit used in rounding in addition to guard and round that is set whenever there are non-zero
bits to the right of the round bit.

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EC8552 COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE UNIT II: ARITHMETIC OPERATIONS

19. What is a/used multiply add?

Floating point instruction that performs both a multiply and add, but .rounds only once after the
add operation is called fused multiply add.
20. What is meant by subword parallelism?
 Parallelism is a used to speed up the process.
 The parallelism must occur within a wide word, in case it extends means that is called as
subword parallelism.
 It is also called data level parallelism or vector or SIMD parallelism.
21. What are the data used to perform parallelism?
Parallelism performs simultaneous operations on short vectors of following values:
 Sixteen 8 bit operands
 Eight 16 bit operands
 Four 32 bit operands
 Two 64 bit operands 22
22. What is biased notation?
Bias is the number subtracted from the normal, unsigned representation to determine the real
value. It is a convenient way to represent the most negative exponent as 0000two and the most
positive as 1111two'

23. How the subtraction can be performed using adder circuit in ALU?
 In ALU adder circuit itself we can perform the subtraction.

 Take complement of the oPerand and add with another operand. It will produce
the subtraction value.

24. How MIPS ignore overflow in signed integers?

MIPS computer has two methods to ignore overflow in signed integers.
 Add (add), add immediate (addi) cause exceptions on overflow.

 Add unsigned, (addu), add immediate unsigned (addiu) do not cause exceptions on
overflow.

25. How 32 bit ALU can be constructed?

32 bit ALU can be constructed using 1 bit ALU.
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EC8552 COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE UNIT II: ARITHMETIC OPERATIONS

26. State the principle of operation of a carry look-ahead adder.

The input carry needed by a stage is directly computed from carry signals obtained from all the
preceding stages i-1,i-2,…..0, rather than waiting for normal carries to supply slowly from stage
to stage. An adder that uses this principle is called carry look-ahead adder.
27. What are the main features of Booth’s algorithm?
 It handles both positive and negative multipliers uniformly.
 It achieves some efficiency in the number of addition required when the multiplier has a
few large blocks of 1s.
28. How can we speed up the multiplication process?(CSE Nov/Dec 2003)
There are two techniques to speed up the multiplication process:
 The first technique guarantees that the maximum number of summands that must be
added is n/2 for n-bit operands.
 The second technique reduces the time needed to add the summands.
29. What is bit pair recoding? Give an example.
Bit pair recoding halves the maximum number of summands. Group the Booth-recoded
multiplier bits in pairs and observe the following: The pair (+1 -1) is equivalent to the pair (0
+1). That is instead of adding -1 times the multiplicand m at shift position i to +1 ( M at position
i+1, the same result is obtained by adding +1 ( M at position i. Eg: 11010 – Bit Pair recoding
value is 0 -1 -2
30. What is the advantage of using Booth algorithm?
 It handles both positive and negative multiplier uniformly.
 It achieves efficiency in the number of additions required when the multiplier has a few
large blocks of 1‘s.
 The speed gained by skipping 1‘s depends on the data.
31.When can you say that a number is normalized?
When the decimal point is placed to the right of the first (nonzero) significant digit, the number
is said to be normalized.
32. Explain about the special values in floating point numbers.
The end values 0 to 255 of the excess-127 exponent E( are used to represent special values such
as: When E(= 0 and the mantissa fraction M is zero the value exact 0 is represented. When E(=

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EC8552 COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE UNIT II: ARITHMETIC OPERATIONS

255 and M=0, the value ( is represented. When E(= 0 and M (0 , demurral values are represented.
When E(= 2555 and M(0, the value represented is called Not a number.
33. Write the Add/subtract rule for floating point numbers.
 Choose the number with the smaller exponent and shift its mantissa right a number of
steps equal to the difference in exponents.
 Set the exponent of the result equal to the larger exponent.
 Perform addition/subtraction on the mantissa and determine the sign of the result
 Normalize the resulting value, if necessary.
34. Write the multiply rule for floating point numbers.
Add the exponent and subtract 127.
Multiply the mantissa and determine the sign of the result.
Normalize the resulting value , if necessary.
35. What is the purpose of guard bits used in floating point arithmetic
Although the mantissa of initial operands is limited to 24 bits, it is important to retain extra bits,
called as guard bits.
36. What are the ways to truncate the guard bits?
There are several ways to truncate the guard bits:
 Chooping
 Von Neumann rounding
 Rounding
37. Define carry save addition(CSA) process.
Instead of letting the carries ripple along the rows, they can be saved and introduced into the next
roe at the correct weighted position. Delay in CSA is less than delay through the ripple carry
adder.
38. What are generate and propagate function? The generate function is given by Gi=xiyi and
The propagate function is given as Pi=xi+yi. 16. What is floating point numbers? In some
cases, the binary point is variable and is automatically adjusted as computation proceeds. In such
case, the binary point is said to float and the numbers are called floating point numbers.
39. In floating point numbers when so you say that an underflow or overflow has occurred?
In single precision numbers when an exponent is less than -126 then we say that an underflow

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EC8552 COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE UNIT II: ARITHMETIC OPERATIONS

has occurred. In single precision numbers when an exponent is less than +127 then we say that
an overflow has occurred.
40. What are the difficulties faced when we use floating point arithmetic?
Mantissa overflow: The addition of two mantissas of the same sign may result in a carryout of
the most significant bit Mantissa underflow: In the process of aligning mantissas, digits may
flow off the right end of the mantissa.
Exponent overflow: Exponent overflow occurs when a positive exponent exceeds the maximum
possible value.
Exponent underflow: It occurs when a negative exponent exceeds the maximum possible
exponent value.
41. In conforming to the IEEE standard mention any four situations under which a
processor sets exception flag.
Underflow: If the number requires an exponent less than -126 or in a double precision, if the
number requires an exponent less than -1022 to represent its normalized form the underflow
occurs.
Overflow: In a single precision, if the number requires an exponent greater than -127 or in a
double precision, if the number requires an exponent greater than +1023 to represent its
normalized form the underflow occurs.
Divide by zero: It occurs when any number is divided by zero.
Invalid: It occurs if operations such as 0/0 are attempted.
42. Why floating point number is more difficult to represent and process than
integer?(CSE May/June 2007)
An integer value requires only half the memory space as an equivalent. IEEE double-precision
floating point value. Applications that use only integer based arithmetic will therefore also have
significantly smaller memory requirement A floating-point operation usually runs hundreds of
times slower than an equivalent integer based arithmetic operation.
43. Give the booth’s recoding and bit-pair recoding of the computer.
1000111101000101(CSE May/June 2006)
44 .Draw the full adder circuit and give the truth table (CSE May/June 2007)

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