Electronic – Do microprocessor have any special hardware to do division and multiplicaiton

armmicrocontrollermicroprocessor

My old school understanding is that multiplication is nothing but successive addition and division is nothing but successive subtraction. So, my question is there any changes being done like do we have a hardware that does the division and multiplication in one machine cycle or go.

For e.g, if I have 2 registers of 64 bits, and if I multiply them, I can get an overflow i.e. I need two 64 registers to store the result. So, when I do multiply do the modern RISC processor does successive addition behind the scene or does it do just multiplication. Is there a hardware that can do just multiplication rather than using full adder?

Best Answer

Some faster and larger processors have hardware multiplier and some slower and smaller don't. Division can be also made faster with hardware. If there is no hardware to help, the software needs to perform multiplication and division with a software algorithm. While successive addition and subtraction can do it, there are faster ways to do it, for example multiply can be performed with shifting and adding.

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