Embodiments of the present invention may provide the capability to evaluate logarithm and power (exponentiation) functions using either hardware specific instructions, or a hardware specific implementation with reduced memory requirements. An input comprising a floating point representation of a real number may be received and a mantissa and an exponent may be extracted. A function of a logarithm of a mantissa of the real number may be approximated by utilizing a polynomial based on the mantissa. The approximated function of the logarithm may be combined with the exponent for calculating a value comprising a logarithm of the real number. Likewise, an input comprising a floating point representation of a real number and a representation of a second number may be received and an approximation of the real number to the power of the second number may be generated.

A computer-implemented method for performing an exponential calculation using only two fully-pipelined instructions in a floating point unit that includes. The method includes computing an intermediate value y′ by multiplying an input operand with a predetermined constant value. The input operand is received in floating point representation. The method further includes computing an exponential result for the input operand by executing a fused instruction. The fused instructions includes converting the intermediate value y′ to an integer representation z represented by v most significant bits (MSB), and w least significant bits (LSB). The fused instruction further includes determining exponent bits of the exponential result based on the v MSB from the integer representation z. The method further includes determining mantissa bits of the exponential result according to a piece-wise linear mapping function using a predetermined number of segments based on the w LSB from the integer representation z.

A computer-implemented method for performing an exponential calculation using only two fully-pipelined instructions in a floating point unit that includes. The method includes computing an intermediate value y by multiplying an input operand with a predetermined constant value. The input operand is received in floating point representation. The method further includes computing an exponential result for the input operand by executing a fused instruction. The fused instructions includes converting the intermediate value y to an integer representation z represented by v most significant bits (MSB), and w least significant bits (LSB). The fused instruction further includes determining exponent bits of the exponential result based on the v MSB from the integer representation z. The method further includes determining mantissa bits of the exponential result according to a piece-wise linear mapping function using a predetermined number of segments based on the w LSB from the integer representation z.