title: Determining Floating Point Square Root
body: <p>How do I determine the square root of a floating point number? Is the Newton-Raphson method a good way? I have no hardware square root either. I also have no hardware divide (but I have implemented floating point divide). </p>
  
  <p>If possible, I would prefer to reduce the number of divides as much as possible since they are so expensive.</p>
  
  <p>Also, what should be the initial guess to reduce the total number of iterations???</p>
  
  <p>Thank you so much!</p>