> Aside: Why 13 bits instead of 12? For our purposes, we’re going to ignore the carries in the most significant limb, allowing numbers to wrap when they overflow past 2256 - 1 (just like how unsigned addition works in C with normal size integer types). As a result, we can assign 52 bits to the most significant limb and ignore the fact that it will run out of room for carries before the other limbs do.
Why not give the top limb 64 bits and the other four limbs 48 bits each, then? You can accumulate more additions before normalization, you can take advantage of word alignment during splitting and normalization if your instruction set has anything useful there, and your overflow properties are identical, no?
Why not give the top limb 64 bits and the other four limbs 48 bits each, then? You can accumulate more additions before normalization, you can take advantage of word alignment during splitting and normalization if your instruction set has anything useful there, and your overflow properties are identical, no?