std.math performance (SSE vs. real)

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Fri, 2014-06-27 at 13:11 +0000, John Colvin via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 27 June 2014 at 13:04:31 UTC, dennis luehring wrote:
> > Am 27.06.2014 14:20, schrieb Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d:
> >> On Fri, 2014-06-27 at 11:10 +0000, John Colvin via 
> >> Digitalmars-d wrote:
> >> [
]
> >>> I understand why the current situation exists. In 2000 x87 was
> >>> the standard and the 80bit precision came for free.
> >>
> >> Real programmers have been using 128-bit floating point for 
> >> decades. All
> >> this namby-pamby 80-bit stuff is just an aberration and should 
> >> never
> >> have happened.
> >
> > what consumer hardware and compiler supports 128-bit floating 
> > points?
> 
> I think he was joking :)

Actually no, but…

> No consumer hardware supports IEEE binary128 as far as I know. 
> Wikipedia suggests that Sparc used to have some support.

For once Wikipedia is not wrong. IBM 128-bit is not IEEE compliant (but
pre-dates IEEE standards). SPARC is IEEE compliant. No other hardware
manufacturer appears to care about accuracy of floating point expression
evaluation. GPU manufacturers have an excuse of sorts in that speed is
more important than accuracy for graphics model evaluation. GPGPU
suffers because of this.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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