Always false float comparisons

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 5/16/16 12:37 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
> Me, I think of that as "Who cares that you paid $$$ for an 80 bit CPU,
> we're going to give you only 64 bits."

I'm not sure about this. My understanding is that all SSE has hardware 
for 32 and 64 bit floats, and the the 80-bit hardware is pretty much 
cut-and-pasted from the x87 days without anyone really looking in 
improving it. And that's been the case for more than a decade. Is that 
correct?

I'm looking for example at 
http://nicolas.limare.net/pro/notes/2014/12/12_arit_speed/ and see that 
on all Intel and compatible hardware, the speed of 80-bit floating point 
operations ranges between much slower and disastrously slower.

I think it's time to revisit our attitudes to floating point, which was 
formed last century in the heydays of x87. My perception is the world 
has moved to SSE and 32- and 64-bit float; the "real" type is a 
distraction for D; the whole let's do things in 128-bit during 
compilation is a time waster; and many of the original things we want to 
do with floating point are different without a distinction, and a 
further waste of our resources.


Andrei