I. Szczesniak:
>
>
> All of Sun's SPARCV9 chips do not implement 128bit floating point in
> hardware and use a software emulation for SPARCV9 ABI conformance.
>
The ABI certainly permits that.
>
> Unfortunately this makes software like perl, python etc slower than
> software running on competing hardware platforms.
>
Which platforms have native 128bit IEEE hw? IBM used a rather perverse
"double double" last time I'd looked, which was fast but like most
non-IEEE schemes had some odd behaviors in corner cases (even IEEE has
odd, but odd and non-Standard conforming is worse).
>
> Sun's 'novel solution' was to reduce the data type for float in perl
> to double, giving Solaris an edge over its competition.
> Unfortunately this 'novel solution' renders the /usr/bin/perl useless
> for the majority of scientific applications while Sun's support
> division keeps telling us that this is the fault of the scientific
> applications (which is a terrific excuse to tell this a Sun customer
> who is developing and selling such software together with Sun's high
> end machines).
>
I was previously unaware of scientific applications coded in Perl which
just means I need to get out more.
Thanks for the clarification.
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Keith Bierman AIM: kbiermank | skype khbkhb
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