I'd just like to say a belated "thanks" for your response - reading the PR,
the attendant discussion and the links therein got me where I needed to be.
If anyone else finds themselves dealing with things like this, the following
links may be of interest:
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/754/
http://www.validlab.com/goldberg/paper.ps (found on the IEEE page)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/Mindless.pdf
Neil.
Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
Neil Ferguson <nferguso@xxxxxxx> writes:
Whilst reading the GCC man page documentation for the -mfpmath option,
I came across this sentence for -mfpmath=sse:
The resulting code should be considerably faster in the major-
ity of cases and avoid the numerical instability problems of
387 code, but may break some existing code that expects tempo-
raries to be 80bit.
Can someone point me to a description of these "numerical instability
problems of 387 code", please?
I've searched the GCC site & mailing lists, and I've searched with
Google, but I can't find anything that details the particular concerns
that led to this note in the manual. All I can find is a list message
containing the patch that put it into the man page.
See, e.g.,
http://gcc.gnu.org/PR323
and the many PRs which have been marked as a duplicate of that one.
Ian
