[Python-ideas] Why not picoseconds?

[Victor Stinner]

Antoine Pitrou:
> Given the implementation costs, hardware decimal128 will only become
> mainstream if there's a strong incentive for it, which I'm not sure
> exists or will ever exist ;-)

Stefan Behnel:
> Then we shouldn't implement the new nanosecond API at all, in order to keep
> pressure on the hardware developers.

POWER6 is available for ten years and has hardware support for decimal128:

"IBM's POWER6 (2007) and System z10 (2008) processors both implement
IEEE 754-2008 fully in hardware and in every core."

I guess that POWER6 is not part of "mainstream" :-)

I'm not aware of any hardware implementation of the decimal floating
point (DFP) for Intel CPU, ARM CPU, or GPU (nothing in OpenCL nor
CUDA).

At least, it seems like Intel knows that DFP exists since they provide
a software implementation :-)
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-decimal-floating-point-math-library

Maybe things will move quicker than than expected, and we will get DFP
even in microcontrollers!? Who knows? ;-)

Victor