this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
665 points (96.1% liked)

Science Memes

11189 readers
2600 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
665
wat (mander.xyz)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
34 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ZILtoid1991 6 points 7 months ago

it multiplies by using a complex set of gate arrays that do some adding, otherwise hardware multipliers are like multiplier tables built up by logic gates. Early CPUs did multiplication by adding (essentially multiplications are just recursively adding the same numbers to themselves), and if you were lucky it was optimized to use bit-shifts.

Division is a lot more complicated though. I did some optimization by multiplying with reciprocals instead, but speed gain was negligible due to memory bandwith limitations.