On 10/19/05, Andy Sy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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.
amd64 as implemented by AMD doesn't use the x87 instructions in favor of using the wide registers. Dunno with Intel though (as I don't have an EM64T xeon hanging somewhere here...) -- Paolo Alexis Falcone [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________ 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
