At 4 bits, you could just have a hard-wired table lookup. Two 4 bit values in, 2...

londons_explore · 2026-04-21T07:30:35 1776756635

Low level software engineers use look up tables.

Hardware engineers realise that a compiler will almost always find some combination of gates which is smaller/faster than the contents of any table.

AlotOfReading · 2026-04-21T03:30:33 1776742233

A LUT is pretty wasteful. You only have a one bit significand, so the mantissa and sign bits are boolean binops, and the exponent is a 2 bit adder.

Taniwha · 2026-04-21T03:24:56 1776741896

and so you can at 1-bit too, and the hardware will be even smaller and cheaper