Is the x87 the most accurate general purpose floating point unit on the market? I honestly don't know either way because I don't know about the relative strengths of different processor FPUs. Perhaps not important but it would help me interpret the line "wanting accuracy out of the most accurate general purpose FPU on the market!" i.e. whether it is to be meant sarcastically because the x87 isn't very accurate or as an irony because there is difficulty in achieving accuracy from GCC on x87 in spite of the hardware being most accurate.
Part of the confusion is that the x86 family of chips is generally considered the old school legacy platform and other processors differentiate themselves on "being x amount more efficient than legacy x86 architecture" however the x86 can still have advantages sometimes. I wonder about the accuracy given that Java has to do some of the floating point mathematics in software because the hardware is not accurate enough for the floating point functionality to achieve IEEE floating point compliance with hardware. (Except sometimes within certain ranges i.e. sin +/- ∏/4 radians ?) I don't doubt that if I need to have it explained it may no longer be funny but I might learn something along the way. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
