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this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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Programmer Humor
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Bit shifting works if you wanna divide by 2 only.
interesting, so does the computer have a special "base 10" ALU that somehow implements division without bit shifting?
In general integer division is implemented using a form of long division, in binary. There is no base-10 arithmetic involved. It's a relatively expensive operation which usually requires multiple clock cycles to complete, whereas dividing by a power of two ("bit shifting") is trivial and can be done in hardware simply by routing the signals appropriately, without any logic gates.
The point of my comment is that division in binary IS bitshifting. There is no other way to do it if you want the real answer. You can estimate, you can round, but the computational method of division is done via bitshifting of binarary expansions of numbers in an ALU.