RE: [f-cpu] Re: Floating-Point?

[Juergen Goeritz <goeritz@oekomm.de>]

On Fri, 17 Aug 2001, Hans Summers wrote:
> Could someone explain to me why 128-bit FP is desireable? I am struggling
> here to think of an application which needs 30 decimal places of precision
> (or whatever it is). In fact I'd go as far as to suggest that in most cases
> 32-bit FP would be sufficient. Chip designers tend to dream of having a
> 128-bit or 256-bit processor etc., but without reference to the real world
> which doesn't need (actually can't make good use of) such high precision FP.
> Expanding the word size won't deliver a performance enhancement. My belief
> is the only way such large word sizes make any kind of sense is in the
> contect of SIMD, where the large word size is effectively a parrelisation.

Ah, I have the same opinion about this theme. You don't really
need a higher precision than 64 bit. Maybe that will change for
galaxy navigation in the future but until now 32 bit are good
(and fast) for most cases. I would rather implement some 32 bit
pipelined floating point instructions than go for a dedicated
fpu anyway... ;-)

JG

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