Floating-point processor architecture

1. What is a floating-point processor?
2. What is floating-point architecture?
3. What is floating point unit in microprocessor?
4. What is the difference between floating-point and fixed point?

What is a floating-point processor?

The floating-point processor provides high-performance execution of floating-point operations. Instructions are provided to perform arithmetic, comparison, and other operations in floating-point registers, and to move floating-point data between storage and the floating-point registers.

What is floating-point architecture?

Computer Graphics

The description of binary numbers in the exponential form is called floating-point representation. The floating-point representation breaks the number into two parts, the left-hand side is a signed, fixed-point number known as a mantissa and the right-hand side of the number is known as the exponent.

What is floating point unit in microprocessor?

A floating-point unit (FPU, colloquially a math coprocessor) is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. Typical operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square root.

What is the difference between floating-point and fixed point?

In fixed point notation, there are a fixed number of digits after the decimal point, whereas floating point number allows for a varying number of digits after the decimal point. This representation has fixed number of bits for integer part and for fractional part.