Saturating Arithmetic

Why it matters

Saturating math prevents wraparound bugs in signals. Understanding shapes DSP and codec correctness.

The architecture

Add: clamp to max on overflow.

Sub: clamp to min on underflow.

Hardware SSE/NEON saturating ops.

How it works end to end

Audio uses saturating add on mixes.

Image processing clamps to 0-255.

Hardware SIMD accelerates.