108
votes
Accepted
Why not use fractions instead of floating point?
When adding or subtracting fractions, you need to find the least common multiple of the two denominators. That's an expensive operation, much more expensive than adding or subtracting floating points, ...
- 26.1k
68
votes
Accepted
Where did the free parameters of IEEE 754 come from?
From an interview with Dr. William Kahan, the IEEE-754 formats were based on the VAX F and G formats, which have 8 and 11-bit exponents respectively. In fact Dr. Kahan also said that previously VAX ...
- 3,542
58
votes
Accepted
Did any compiler fully use Intel x87 80-bit floating point?
Yes. For example, the C math library has had full support for long double, which on x87 was 80 bits wide, since C99. Previous versions of the standard library supported only the double type. ...
- 8,549
57
votes
What was the last x86 CPU that did not have the x87 floating-point unit built in?
As far as I’m aware, the last FPU-less x86-compatible CPU which could still be considered general-purpose is the Vortex86SX, released in 2007 and still available now. This is a Pentium-class CPU, ...
- 118k
56
votes
Did any compiler fully use Intel x87 80-bit floating point?
TL:DR: Yes, most C/C++ compilers other than MSVC expose an 80-bit IEEE754 Extended Precision format (x87, 68881) as long double, and some implementations of other languages have it as REAL10 or ...
- 2,925
54
votes
Why not use fractions instead of floating point?
My question is, why not use fractions?
Quick answer:
Too much code needed
Dynamic storage needed
Long representation even for simple numbers
Complex and slow execution
And most prominent:
Because ...
- 213k
49
votes
Accepted
How did the 8086 interface with the 8087 FPU coprocessor?
The opcodes in your list are all only 16 bits (plus the extra bytes for address calculation) and you'll notice that they all begin (in hex) with Dx where x >= 8. This is because, to the 8086, any ...
- 11.4k
47
votes
Accepted
Why did 8-bit Basic use 40-bit floating point?
The floating-point routines for Microsoft BASIC were written by Monte Davidoff in 1975, originally for the Altair, which used an Intel 8080 CPU. The source code had been lost for years, until Bill ...
- 8,549
45
votes
Accepted
Did any PC software floating point use non-IEEE format?
Turbo Pascal 2.x and the "ordinary" version of Turbo Pascal 3.x used a six-byte floating-point format which offered higher precision than an IEEE single-precision float, offering the ...
- 34.7k
37
votes
Did any PC software floating point use non-IEEE format?
The BASIC built into the ROM of the original IBM PC, as well as the BASICA and GW-BASIC programs, and therefore all software written in the language, used Microsoft Binary Format for floating-point ...
- 8,549
35
votes
Accepted
What aspect of portable floating point did Java back down on?
The range of intermediate results.
The Java Language Specification, 2nd Ed. relaxed the evaluation rules for floating-point expressions by introducing the notion of an ‘FP-strict’ expression, defined ...
- 21.6k
33
votes
Accepted
Why did the 8087 need a special socket?
But why was the 8087 designed such that it needed a special socket?
Because the 8087 is a processor EXTENSION, not another CPU.
The 8087 has, except for a few lines, exactly the same signals and ...
- 213k
32
votes
Accepted
Detecting the external x87 FPU
The documented way to detect an x87 FPU is to attempt to initialise it, and then read its control word (FPU_STATUS must be set to some non-zero value first):
FNINIT
FNSTSW WORD PTR [FPU_STATUS]
This ...
- 118k
31
votes
Why was BASIC's INT() a floor, and not a truncate?
It Has (Almost) Always Been Floor
Since at least 1966, with Dartmouth BASIC V3, the behaviour of INT is defined as as delivering an integer not greater than X - which otherwise may be called FLOOR. ...
- 213k
30
votes
Accepted
What did Pete Stewart think he knew about efficient implementation of floating point denormals?
As far as I am familiar with the genesis of the IEEE-754 floating-point standard from the literature, G. W. Stewart never looked at implementation cost for the support of gradual underflow. He was ...
- 1,446
27
votes
Why not use fractions instead of floating point?
There is a mathematical problem with your idea. If you choose to store fractions with a fixed-length numerator and denominator, that's works fine until you try to do arithmetic with them. At that ...
- 6,646
26
votes
Did any compiler fully use Intel x87 80-bit floating point?
I worked for Borland back in the days of the 8086/8087. Back then, both Turbo C and Microsoft C defined long double as an 80-bit type, matching the layout of Intel's 80-bit floating-point type. Some ...
- 361
26
votes
Why did 8-bit Basic use 40-bit floating point?
Using a 32 bit signed mantissa and 8 bit unsigned exponent has one major advantage: You can re-use 32 bit integer math functions for operating on the mantissa.
That re-use saves memory. It may even be ...
- 15.1k
24
votes
Accepted
Why the change in layout of single and double precision in floating-point registers?
When you have a small transistor budget, it is considerably easier to design your circuitry around a single representation format - the most capable one - and treat converting other formats to and ...
- 16.7k
21
votes
Accepted
Why does Sinclair BASIC have two formats for storing numbers in the same structure?
The ZX Spectrum has two formats for storing numbers, both 40 bits, or five bytes.
Jup, like many other machines - one for float and one for integer.
The second is some kind of 16-bit integer ...
- 213k
20
votes
Why not use fractions instead of floating point?
Floating-point isn't just about representing numbers that have fractional parts. It's also about representing numbers that are very large, or very small, in a way that allows extra range by ...
- 11.4k
20
votes
Why did 8-bit Basic use 40-bit floating point?
It's not a power of 2, not a nice round number
But it is :-) 1 byte exponent, 4 bytes mantissa (with an assumed 1 bit always equal to one and reused as a sign), at least on the ZX Spectrum – see the ...
- 4,953
19
votes
Accepted
Commodore BASIC and binary floating point precision
This example reveals a rounding error under Commodore BASIC V2.0:
A=0.3:B=0.6:IF A+B<>0.9 THEN PRINT A+B-0.9
Running this on a C64 yields a difference of 2.32830644e-10. Other pairs that ...
- 4,437
18
votes
What was the last x86 CPU that did not have the x87 floating-point unit built in?
All Intel x86 CPUs since the 80486 line have included floating point instructions, i.e. everything from the Pentium* onward. So the last Intel processor to lack an on-board floating-point unit (FPU) ...
- 8,036
18
votes
Accepted
Which x87 first acquired the ability to flush denormal to zero?
Full disclosure: I worked on the x87 FPU of a 486-class CPU at a math-coprocessor company in the early 1990s and thereafter worked at AMD, where I was on the 3DNow! design team and the design team for ...
- 1,446
17
votes
Accepted
When did game consoles begin including FPUs?
The first major console to incorporate an IEEE 754 floating point unit would be the N64.
The main use of them in games is for the mathematical operations involved when transforming in-game 3D objects ...
- 1,519
17
votes
Where did the free parameters of IEEE 754 come from?
Well, the first thing to remember about these binary formats
you're talking about (there were also decimal formats) is that they
are the interchange formats; it's not required that hardware, or
even ...
- 24.6k
17
votes
Did any PC software floating point use non-IEEE format?
Half-precision wasn't a IEEE-754 standard format before 2008
Several earlier 16-bit floating point formats have existed including
that of Hitachi's HD61810 DSP 2 of 1982, Scott's WIF [3] and the
3dfx ...
- 1,209
17
votes
Accepted
Did any hardware-supported floating-point format ever fast-track integers?
Computer architectures designed by Sergey Lebedev did not have a separate integer unit. Integers were represented as unnormalized floating point values with the exponent chosen to make the LSB have ...
- 18.3k
15
votes
Floating point performance of classic minicomputers
There are nearly endless benchmarks (see a short list of relevance at Benchmark Programs and Reports on the Top500 site) and it may need a bit of work to understand each benchmark's implications (see ...
- 213k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible