Rafael 'Dido' Sevilla wrote: > Need the precision for mathematical calculations? The last time I > checked, double precision IEEE-754 numbers are 64 bits wide, and every > PC FPU since the 8087 math coprocessor has been internally doing > floating point operations on 80-bit long doubles. I don't see how going > 64-bit would make mathematical calculations more precise than you can > already do them. It would make them faster, certainly, but they'll be > just as accurate as they were on 32-bit processors.
I believe there are now Streaming SIMD instructions which can do 128-bit floating point math that were not available in 32-bit chips. Judging from the way the x87 instructions have remained unchanged over the years while SSE has been steadily growing richer, I get the impression that it is slowly being deprecated in favor of SSE. _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
