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Re: GCC beaten by ICC in stupid trig test!
- From: Joe Buck <Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot COM>
- To: Bradley Lucier <lucier at math dot purdue dot edu>
- Cc: roger at eyesopen dot com, gdr at integrable-solutions dot net,gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org, abraham at dina dot kvl dot dk, gcc-patches at gcc dot gnu dot org,toon at moene dot indiv dot nluug dot nl, laurent at guerby dot net, fjahanian at apple dot com
- Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 10:51:46 -0800
- Subject: Re: GCC beaten by ICC in stupid trig test!
- References: <13661448-7DC0-11D8-817F-000A958F150A@math.purdue.edu>
On Wed, Mar 24, 2004 at 01:21:32PM -0500, Bradley Lucier wrote:
> Re:
>
> > On Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 10:32:13PM -0500, Robert Dewar wrote:
> > > For example, if -ffast-math is so sloppy as to consider
> > > that (a+b)+c can be replaced by a+(b+c), then all bets are off.
> >
> > That's why -ffast-math doesn't do that; such a transformation would be
> > massively brain-damaged.
>
> Well, -ffast-math (or more specifically, -funsafe-math-optimizations)
> is about to do this, at least in some cases on tree-ssa, see
>
> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2004-03/msg01891.html
>
> If you think that this transformation shouldn't be done, then I guess
> now is the time to speak up.
It's OK for -ffast-math to make the kind of transformation that might
lose the last bit or two of an IEEE FP result. However, disregarding
parentheses will frequently throw away far more precision than that.
Consider a, b, and c as single precision floating point values, and
a=1, b=-1, c=1.2345e-8. (a+b)+c will compute as 1.2345e-8. a+(b+c)
will return zero, as will (a+c)+b. *All* the precision of the result,
every single bit, is lost. This is because FLT_EPSILON is 1.1920929e-07F,
and 1.0F plus a value smaller than 1.0F gives zero. Now, in on x86
you might not see this because the value is computed to 80 bits, but
what if you spill the partial sum?
And no, I'm not being pedantic; in many scientific apps, the programmer
is aware of the expected range of values the variables will have, and
will deliberately arrange the operations so that variables of similar
magnitudes are combined.