APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR PERFORMING MAGNITUDE DETECTION FOR ARITHMETIC OPERATIONS

摘要

An apparatus and method is provided comprising processing circuitry, one or more registers and control circuitry. The control circuitry is configured such that it is responsive to a combined magnitude-detecting arithmetic instruction to control the processing circuitry to perform an arithmetic operation on at least one data element and further to perform a magnitude-detecting operation. The magnitude-detecting operation calculates a magnitude-indicating result providing an indication of a position of a most-significant bit of a magnitude of a result of the arithmetic operation irrespective of whether the most-significant bit position exceeds the data element width of the at least one data element.