ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 7 -- United States Patent no. 12,596,550, issued on April 7, was assigned to GRAPHCORE Ltd. (Bristol, Great Britain).
"Dual-mode floating point processor operation" was invented by Alan Alexander (Wotton-Under-Edge, Great Britain).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "By providing a mode indication, an execution unit is operable to operate in two separate modes, each of which cause the execution unit to perform calculations by interpreting the same bit string (the first of the bit strings) as representing one of two different values. When operating in the first mode, the first of the bit string represents an undefined value, in other words a NaN. When operating in the second mo...