Patent ID: 8838942

Claim:
A method for performing combinations of multiply, add, and subtract operations in an environment supporting both Binary Floating Point (BFP) operations and non-BFP floating point operations, wherein the non-BFP floating point operations comprise Hexadecimal Floating Point (HFP) operations by executing a floating point instruction in a computer system, the computer system comprising a plurality of general registers, and a general purpose processor in communications with a computer memory, the processor comprising one or more execution units, the execution units executing instructions fetched from the computer memory, the method comprising: providing at least three operands of a combination multiply add/subtract instruction to a main fraction dataflow element of a floating point element, each of said operands comprising BFP floating point format values or non-BFP floating point format values, said non-BFP floating point format values comprising floating point format values other than BFP format values, and said main fraction dataflow element configured to process both BFP floating point format values and non-BFP floating point format values for said operands; responsive to the combined multiply add/subtract instruction being a non-BFP floating point multiply add/subtract instruction, the main fraction dataflow element performing a non-BFP floating point operation on the three operands to produce a non-BFP main fraction result, the non-BFP floating point operation specified by the combination multiply add/subtract instruction, the non-BFP main fraction result comprising non-BFP floating point format fraction values; and responsive to the combined multiply add/subtract instruction being a BFP multiply add/subtract instruction, the main fraction dataflow element performing a BFP operation on the three operands to produce a BFP main fraction result, the BFP operation specified by the combination multiply add/subtract instruction, the BFP main fraction result comprising BFP format fraction values.