RE: Mersenne: Thoughts on Merced / IA-64

[Anonymous]

At 11:02 AM 6/17/99 -0500, Willmore, David wrote:
>No, no, no, no. :)

I'm speaking that in general you need FP hardware.

>  Georges code uses the FPU of intel chips because the
>early ones had very poor integer processing capabilities

The Intel FPU is still better at handling 64-bit integers than using two 32-bit
doublewords.

>But, you can do it in integer if you have a processor with 1) enough integer
>registers 2) wide registers and 3) fast/pipelined multiply--which IA-64 is
>supposed to have.  

The IA-64 sounds like a monster.  I'll want one, but they'll probably be too
expensive for a few years.  (It happens over and over - "no person will need
that much on their desktop.")



+----------------------------------------------+
| Jud "program first and think later" McCranie |
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