Single precision floating point calcs?

Grant Edwards grante at visi.com
Thu May 10 09:54:00 EDT 2007


On 2007-05-10, Ross Ridge <rridge at caffeine.csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> Grant Edwards  <grante at visi.com> wrote:

>>In the C implementations, the algorithms will be done
>>implemented in single precision, so doing my Python prototyping
>>in as close to single precision as possible would be "a good
>>thing".
>
> Something like numpy might give you reproducable IEEE 32-bit
> floating point arithmetic, but you may find it difficult to
> get that out of a IA-32 C compiler.

That's OK, I don't run the C code on an IA32.  The C target is
a Hitachi H8/300.

> (You might also want to consider whether you want to using
> single precision in your C code to begin with, on IA-32 CPUs
> it seldom makes a difference in performance.)

Since I'm running the C code on a processor without HW floating
point support, using single precision makes a big difference.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! I have many CHARTS
                                  at               and DIAGRAMS..
                               visi.com            



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