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The register width of a processor determines the range of values that can be represented in its registers. Though the vast majority of computers can perform multiple-precision arithmetic on operands in memory, allowing numbers to be arbitrarily long and overflow to be avoided, the register width limits the sizes of numbers that can be operated on (e.g., added or subtracted) using a single ...
Some architectures may be configured to automatically generate an exception on an operation resulting in overflow. An example, suppose we add 127 and 127 using 8-bit registers. 127+127 is 254, but using 8-bit arithmetic the result would be 1111 1110 binary, which is the two's complement encoding of −2, a negative number. A negative sum of ...
In addition and subtraction, the result may require one bit more than the operands. In multiplication of two unsigned integers with m and n bits, the result may have m+n bits. In case of overflow, the high-order bits are usually lost, as the un-scaled integer gets reduced modulo 2 n where n is the size of the storage area. The sign bit, in ...
Within CPUs and other logic devices, collections of bit fields called flags are commonly used to control or to indicate the outcome of particular operations. [4] Processors have a status register that is composed of flags. For example, if the result of an addition cannot be represented in the destination an arithmetic overflow is set.
Although saturation arithmetic is less popular for integer arithmetic in hardware, the IEEE floating-point standard, the most popular abstraction for dealing with approximate real numbers, uses a form of saturation in which overflow is converted into "infinity" or "negative infinity", and any other operation on this result continues to produce ...
When implemented in software, long multiplication algorithms must deal with overflow during additions, which can be expensive. A typical solution is to represent the number in a small base, b, such that, for example, 8b is a representable machine integer. Several additions can then be performed before an overflow occurs.
Arbitrary-precision arithmetic can also be used to avoid overflow, which is an inherent limitation of fixed-precision arithmetic. Similar to an automobile's odometer display which may change from 99999 to 00000, a fixed-precision integer may exhibit wraparound if numbers grow too large to represent at the fixed level of precision.