On 5/16/16 12:37 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
Me, I think of that as "Who cares that you paid $$$ for an 80 bit CPU, we're going to give you only 64 bits."
I'm not sure about this. My understanding is that all SSE has hardware for 32 and 64 bit floats, and the the 80-bit hardware is pretty much cut-and-pasted from the x87 days without anyone really looking in improving it. And that's been the case for more than a decade. Is that correct?
I'm looking for example at http://nicolas.limare.net/pro/notes/2014/12/12_arit_speed/ and see that on all Intel and compatible hardware, the speed of 80-bit floating point operations ranges between much slower and disastrously slower.
I think it's time to revisit our attitudes to floating point, which was formed last century in the heydays of x87. My perception is the world has moved to SSE and 32- and 64-bit float; the "real" type is a distraction for D; the whole let's do things in 128-bit during compilation is a time waster; and many of the original things we want to do with floating point are different without a distinction, and a further waste of our resources.
Andrei
