Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: re:Floating point performance
Message-ID: <7218@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 9-Oct-86 17:40:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.7218
Posted: Thu Oct  9 17:40:48 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 9-Oct-86 17:40:48 EDT
References: <3833@nsc.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 19

> ...what do the people on the net feel about transcendental functions?
> The Whetstone seems to me to place more emphasis on them than real life.
> One of the reasons for not including them directly in the 32081 was that
> it was felt that implementing them in math routines instead of hardware 
> was more cost effective.  Is this true or are transcendentals important
> enough for the increased cost of implementing them in hardware?

Personally, while I strongly suspect that a software implementation is
more cost-effective than doing them in hardware, putting them on-chip
strikes me as a marvellous way of getting them right once and for all
and encouraging everyone to use the done-right version.  (This does assume,
of course, that the chip-maker spends the necessary money to *get* them
right, which requires high-paid specialists and a lot of work.)  One
could get much the same effect with a bare-bones arithmetic chip and a
ROM chip containing the math routines, except that ROMs are too easy to
copy and you'd never recover the investment needed to do a good job.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry