Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!pacbell!pacbell.com!ucsd!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!texsun!convex!convex.COM From: patrick@convex.COM (Patrick F. McGehearty) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Killer Micro II Message-ID: <105568@convex.convex.com> Date: 29 Aug 90 16:43:29 GMT References: <2482@l.cc.purdue.edu> <1990Aug29.005329.13598@uncecs.edu> Sender: usenet@convex.com Reply-To: patrick@convex.COM (Patrick F. McGehearty) Organization: Convex Computer Corporation, Richardson, Tx. Lines: 28 In article <1990Aug29.005329.13598@uncecs.edu> urjlew@uncecs.edu (Rostyk Lewyckyj) writes: > >One detail that should not be overlooked in this discussion of fp. >precision, is that the 64 bits used to represent your number is >subdivided into sign + exponent + fraction. So a 64 bit fp number >gives you only between 48 and 56 bits of fraction. (56 bits for >the IBM 360 architecture, and I believe 48 for a CRAY and most >other base 2 machines). IEEE is what? 80 bits divided up into >1+15+64 ? So it really takes 80 bit fp for 64 bits of precision. Actually, there are several IEEE extended precision specifications for different numbers of bits. For IEEE, the 32 bit representation includes 23 represented bits and an implicit 1 bit in the 24th position for the mantissa. The exponent is represented by 8 bits (10**-38 to 10**+38) and a sign bit. The 64 bit representation has 52+1 bits for the mantissa and 11 bits for the exponent, for a range of 10**-308 to 10**+308. I don't have the full spec, does anyone know the other IEEE representation patterns? For those of you not into Numerical Analysis, there are series of computations which will give radically different results with only single bit changes in the double precision input data. Computations of this sort are called numerically unstable. For example, d=a*(b-c) where b = c +/- epsilon for small epsilon can change the sign of the result.