15. Floating-Point Unit

15.3 Floating-Point General Registers (FGRs)


The Floating-Point Unit is the hardware implementation of Coprocessor 1 in the MIPS IV Instruction Set Architecture. The MIPS IV ISA defines 32 logical floating-point general registers (FGRs), as shown in Figure 15-2. Each FGR is 64 bits wide and can hold either 32-bit single-precision or 64-bit double-precision values. The hardware actually contains 64 physical 64-bit registers in the Floating-Point Register File, from which the 32 logical registers are taken.

FP instructions use a 5-bit logical number to select an individual FGR. These logical numbers are mapped to physical registers by the rename unit (in pipeline stage 2), before the Floating-Point Unit executes them. Physical registers are selected using 6-bit addresses.




Copyright 1995, MIPS Technologies, Inc. -- 29 JAN 96


Generated with CERN WebMaker