On Fri, 2005-10-14 at 10:34 +0100, Steve Harris wrote: > On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 11:37:30AM +0300, Hannu Savolainen wrote: > > Floating point in turn has 24 bits of precision which is enough for audio. > > The exponent part takes care of scaling while the mantissa stays always > > normalized to the full 24 bit precision. In fact 64 bit precision is used > > for computations and intermediate results inside the FPU (x86 at least). > > In this way the programmer doesn't need to think about the precision (in > > most cases). > > Pedantic geekiness warning > > Actually there are 25 fixed-point equivalent bits of precision, due to the > implicit 1. Its not much difference, but sometimes it matters. >
With so many experts around, it would be nice to have a small, effecient 16bit -> float, as well as a float -> 16bit (uhm, right, Intel hardware will do this for you, but say you are someahere else) > - Steve --
