A method and computer system are provided for implementing a square root operation using an iterative converging approximation technique. The method includes fewer computations than conventional methods, and only includes computations which are simple to implement in hardware on a computer system, such as multiplication, addition, subtraction and shifting. Therefore, the methods described herein are adapted specifically for being performed on a computer system, e.g. in hardware, and allow the computer system to perform a square root operation with low latency and with low power consumption.