MIPS division of signed integers

Question

I'm wondering if anyone might know how to perform a division between two signed integers in MIPS, WITHOUT using the built in division operations.

In the problem specs, I'm told the divisor register, ALU, and quotient register are all 32 bits wide, and the remainder register is 64 bits.

Answer 1

There are various methods - I would suggest Newton-Raphson, which is simple and fast, and uses only multiplication and subtraction.

If multiplication is not allowed then there also seem to be plenty of integer division algorithms which just use shifts, bitwise operations and add/subtract, e.g. first hit on Google: www.bearcave.com/software/divide.htm