Once the domain of esoteric scientific and business computing, floating point calculations are now practically everywhere. From video games to large language models and kin, it would seem that a processor without floating point capabilities is pretty much a brick at this point. Yet the truth is that integer-based approximations can be good enough to […]
[Ken Shirriff] has been sharing a really low-level look at Intel’s Pentium (1993) processor. The Pentium’s architecture was highly innovative in many ways, and one of [Ken]’s most recent discoveries is that it contains a complex circuit — containing around 9,000 transistors — whose sole purpose is to multiply specifically by three. Why does such […]