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From: tmoran@bix.com
Subject: Re: fixed point vs floating point
Date: 1997/11/27
Message-ID: <65kgu4$289@lotho.delphi.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 293216949
Organization: Delphi Internet Services <http://www.delphi.com/>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-11-27T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


>Indeed with the modern progression of ever increasing values for the
>ratio (processor-speed / main-memory-speed), table lookup can often
>be quite unattractive. On a really fast processor a second level cache
>miss is enough time to compute LOTS of floating-point stuff.
  So the current crop of systems has fast fpt, slow integer */, and
slow memory.  A few years ago that was not the case.  Things like
MMX instructions start to move back toward fast integer arithmetic.
What's fast this year is not the same as what's fast next year.
As Mathew Heaney pointed out earlier, it would be wise to design
data types, etc, to match the problem, and then, if speed is
an issue, change things to optimize for the particular current target.