Why do floating point operations differ between -m64 -O0/-O1 and -m32 -O0?

[Bob Plantz]

On 11/24/2010 7:08 AM, Tim Prince wrote:
> It depends.  For Intel CPUs, there is no performance gain for single 
> precision scalar operations, other than divide and sqrt, where  SSE 
> performance could be matched by the (impractical) setting of 24-bit 
> 387 precision.  Current CPUs (and compilers) support vectorization 
> performance gain over a wider variety of situations than early SSE CPUs.
>>
>> It's not that I don't want the excess precision (looks like a Good 
>> Thing to me; less rounding errors).  It's that I'm not sure if I can 
>> count on it being there.  Would the above routine be a good enough 
>> check to see whether excess precision is there?
>>
> The consistently reliable way to use x87 80-bit precision is with long 
> double data types.  This precludes many important optimizations.
>
I'm not a Windows programmer, but I ran across this:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff545910(VS.85).aspx  <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff545910%28VS.85%29.aspx>
which may raise some concerns about portability of code.

--Bob