[Issue 360] Compile-time floating-point calculations are sometimes inconsistent

[Sean Kelly]

Don Clugston wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> I was disappointed in the AMD-64 because it didn't do 128 bit floats, 
>> in fact, it relegated 80 bit floats to a backwater in the instruction 
>> set. Few computer people seem to understand the value in high 
>> precision floating point.
> 
> Intel seems to be better than AMD in this regard. Intel added an 82 bit 
> floating point type to the Itanium so that it could do 80-bit hypot() 
> without overflow (in fact, Itanium seems to have by far the best 
> floating point support that I've seen); AMD's 3DNow! didn't even support 
> subnormals, infinity, or NaN.

I think AMD simply set its sights on the game industry as the 
battleground, which seems to be supported by the presence of forums on 
LAN parties and system modding (http://forums.amd.com/).  This stands in 
contrast with the Intel, who has an entire set of forums for software 
development (http://softwareforums.intel.com/).  I decided to ask 
whether AMD has another location for software development discussion.  I 
have no idea whether science-minded software companies or developers 
communicate to AMD that they'd like improved floating-point support, but 
a bit more couldn't hurt.


Sean