Many low-cost platforms that support floating-point arithmetic, such as microcontrollers and field-programmable gate arrays, do not include fast hardware or software methods for calculating the square root and/or reciprocal square root. Typically, such functions are implemented using direct lookup tables or polynomial approximations, with a subsequent application of the Newton–Raphson method. Other, more complex solutions include high-radix digit-recurrence and bipartite or multipartite table-based methods. In contrast, this article proposes a simple modification of the fast inverse square root method that has high accuracy and relatively low latency. Algorithms are given in C/C++ for single- and double-precision numbers in the IEEE 754 format for both square root and reciprocal square root functions. These are based on the switching of magic constants in the initial approximation, depending on the input interval of the normalized floating-point numbers, in order to minimize the maximum relative error on each subinterval after the first iteration—giving 13 correct bits of the result. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithms provide a fairly good trade-off between accuracy and latency after two iterations for numbers of type float, and after three iterations for numbers of type double when using fused multiply–add instructions—giving almost complete accuracy.

We develop a bit manipulation technique for single precision floating point numbers which leads to new algorithms for fast computation of the cube root and inverse cube root. It uses the modified iterative Newton–Raphson method (the first order of convergence) and Householder method (the second order of convergence) to increase the accuracy of the results. The proposed algorithms demonstrate high efficiency and reduce error several times in the first iteration in comparison with known algorithms. After two iterations 22.84 correct bits were obtained for single precision. Experimental tests showed that our novel algorithm is faster and more accurate than library functions for microcontrollers.