On Thu, Jun 17, 1999 at 11:02:05AM -0500, Willmore, David wrote:
>The floating point version was a cluge to make up for an,
>uhhh, *interesting* processor archetecture. It shouldn't make everyone
>think that it's always the best way to do things.
Perhaps not. Not to take any sides in this discussion, but when I first
joined GIMPS, I had a Cyrix 6x86 CPU. It was (is) _really_ poor for FPU
work, so I tried to make George include an integer algorithm. His answer
was that even though he _had_ an old integer version, it was rougly
_seven_ times as slow as the FPU version. Now, we must try to find out
how much the difference is (and of course, in `whose' favour (excuse me
if my English is bad at the time of writing) it is) on the IA-64. I
think I've read about Intel's plans. Quick summary:
1. Merced comes out. So expensive, it's targetted at the server market
only.
2. Foster comes out. Still being IA-32 compatible, it _matches_ the
performance of the Merced!
3. Next generation IA-64 (can't remember the name) comes out. The price
is now reasonable enough for desktop markets. (Although I would guess
still rather expensive, and targetted at the high-end desktop market...)
That was just some facts to educate you all ;-)
>> +----------------------------------------------+
>> | Jud "program first and think later" McCranie |
>> +----------------------------------------------+
>*laugh* Uh, hmmm, think now? :)
I think that resembles to a great deal my own programming style. I happen
to write things not `top-down' or 'bottom-up', but more `left-right'. When
I happen to get an idea I must think about, I actually have to stand up
from the chair and walk about, so I can think of the idea instead of
spitting out even more low-quality code... Good George is programming this
thing, and not me :-)
/* Steinar */
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