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Re: Fourth Draft "Unsafe fp optimizations" project description.
- To: kaih at khms dot westfalen dot de, moshier at moshier dot ne dot mediaone dot net
- Subject: Re: Fourth Draft "Unsafe fp optimizations" project description.
- From: dewar at gnat dot com
- Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2001 19:38:06 -0400 (EDT)
- Cc: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
<<Whatever the IEEE 754 committee may say about it, however, the fact is
that vendors are going to continue to offer flush to zero machines
because there are good engineering reasons to do so. It would be most
helpful if the committee would seek to determine and codify the
industry practice. It will be much less helpful if the committee
comes out with unpracticed rules that the industry is going to ignore
as it has already done in the past.
>>
THat's a little fierce. It is true that some companies have ignored
denormals (notably Alpha -- to be discontinued in 2004, and SGI/MIPS --
with SGI stock at 50 cents, destined to play a smaller role in the
future of high end numerical computing I fear :-)
However, most architectures do adequately support denormals.