Power6 Decimal Divide

The IEEE 754-R floating-point standard has defined the arithmetic and encodings of the new decimal floating-point format. The C and C++ standards as well as other language standards have proposed a new data type to help programmers exploit the performance of this new hardware format. The IBM Power6 microprocessor will soon release the first hardware implementation of this decimal floating-point format. A discussion of how the decimal division operation is implemented in high frequency BCD hardware and a comparison to other division methods is provided. This implementation reuses some popular binary division algorithms such as prescaling and non-restoring division to reduce the amount of additional hardware. Novel twists are applied to these algorithms to adapt them for BCD formatted numbers.