Floating point Arithmetic pipelines

Floating point calculations are the best candidates for pipelining. Take the illustration of addition of two floating point numbers. Subsequent phases are recognized for the addition of two floating point numbers:

• First phase will compare the exponents of the given two numbers.
• Second phase will glance for alignment of mantissas.
• In third phase mantissas are added.
• In the final stage result is normalized.

These stages are displayed in Figure below.

Figure: Arithmetic Pipeline for Floating point addition of two numbers