Math processing by detection of elementary valued operands
One embodiment of the present invention includes a method for simplifying arithmetic operations by detecting operands with elementary values such as zero or 1.0. Computer and graphics processing systems perform a great number of multiply-add operations. In a significant portion of these operations, the values of one or more of the operands are zero or 1.0. By detecting the occurrence of these elementary values, math operations can be greatly simplified, for example by eliminating multiply operations when one multiplicand is zero or 1.0 or eliminating add operations when one addend is zero. The simplified math operations resulting from detecting elementary valued operands provide significant savings in overhead power, dynamic processing power, and cycle time.