Patent ID: 7953784

Claim:
An article of manufacture comprising: at least one computer usable medium having computer readable program code logic to execute a machine instruction in a central processing unit, said computer readable program code logic when executing performing the following: obtaining a machine instruction for execution, the machine instruction being defined for computer execution according to a computer architecture, the machine instruction comprising an opcode, a register field, an index field, a base field and a displacement value; and performing a function defined by the opcode of the machine instruction of determining whether a first operand included in a register specified by the register field is a safe decimal floating point number or is a potentially unsafe decimal floating point number, said function comprising: determining a data group and a sign for the first operand; determining a plurality of second operand bits using the index field, base field and displacement value of the machine instruction, each bit of the plurality of second operand bits corresponding to a data group and sign combination; selecting a bit of the plurality of second operand bits based on the data group and sign determined for the first operand; determining a value of the selected bit; and setting a condition code based on the value of the selected bit, the condition code indicating whether a result of a floating point operation is safe or potentially unsafe.