Method and System for Efficient Floating-Point Compression

摘要

An apparatus and method for compressing floating-point values. For example, one embodiment of a processor comprises: instruction fetch circuitry to fetch instructions from a memory, the instructions including floating-point instructions; execution circuitry to execute the floating-point instructions, each floating-point instruction having one or more floating-point operands, each floating-point operand comprising an exponent value and a significand value; floating-point compression circuitry to compress a plurality of the exponent values associated with a corresponding plurality of the floating-point operands, the floating-point compression circuitry comprising: base generation circuitry to evaluate the plurality of the exponent values to generate a first base value; and delta generation circuitry to determine a difference between the plurality of exponent values and the first base value and to generate a corresponding first plurality of delta values, wherein the floating-point compression circuitry is to store the first base value and the corresponding first plurality of delta values as a plurality of compressed exponent values.