Patent attributes
Embodiments of the disclosure are drawn to apparatuses and methods for determining extremum numerical values. Numerical values may be stored in files of a stack, with each bit of the numerical value stored in a content addressable memory (CAM) cell of the file. Each file may be associated with an accumulator circuit, which provides an accumulator signal. An extremum search operation may be performed where a sequence of comparison bits are compared in a bit-by-bit fashion to each bit of the numerical values. The accumulator circuits each provide an accumulator signal which indicates if the numerical value in the associated file is an extremum value or not. Examples of extremum search operations include finding a maximum of the numerical values and a minimum of the numerical values.