A universal floating-point Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) compute engine implemented entirely in hardware. The ISA compute engine computes directly with human-readable decimal character sequence floating-point representation operands without first having to explicitly perform a conversion-to-binary-format process in software. A fully pipelined convertToBinaryFromDecimalCharacter hardware operator logic circuit converts one or more human-readable decimal character sequence floating-point representations to IEEE 754-2008 binary floating-point representations every clock cycle. Following computations by at least one hardware floating-point operator, a convertToDecimalCharacterFromBinary hardware conversion circuit converts the result back to a human-readable decimal character sequence floating-point representation.