Analysis of the impact of different methods for division/square root computation in the performance of a superscalar microprocessor

An analysis of the impact of different methods for the double-precision computation of division and square root in the performance of a superscalar processor is presented in this paper. This analysis is carried out combining the SimpleScalar toolset, estimates of the latency and throughput of the compared methods and a set of benchmarks with typical features of intensive computing applications. Simulation results show the importance of having an efficient unit for the computation of these operations, since changes in the density of division and square root below 1% lead to changes in the performance around a 20%.