English

Computing Integer Powers in Floating-Point Arithmetic

Numerical Analysis 2007-06-13 v1 Mathematical Software

Abstract

We introduce two algorithms for accurately evaluating powers to a positive integer in floating-point arithmetic, assuming a fused multiply-add (fma) instruction is available. We show that our log-time algorithm always produce faithfully-rounded results, discuss the possibility of getting correctly rounded results, and show that results correctly rounded in double precision can be obtained if extended-precision is available with the possibility to round into double precision (with a single rounding).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0705.4369,
  title  = {Computing Integer Powers in Floating-Point Arithmetic},
  author = {Peter Kornerup and Vincent Lefèvre and Jean-Michel Muller},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0705.4369},
  year   = {2007}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T08:33:17.972Z