Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!eagle!icdoc!qmc-cs!liam
From: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re:  NeWS's use of floating point
Summary: It does use some, but not much
Message-ID: <553@sequent.cs.qmc.ac.uk>
Date: 29 Jul 88 11:05:18 GMT
References: <8807242004.AA17741@frame.com>
Reply-To: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Organization: Computer Science Dept, Queen Mary College, University of London, UK.
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In article <8807242004.AA17741@frame.com> greg@gergle.UUCP writes:
>>I wonder how much faster news_server would run if it was
>>compiled with the -f68881 flag.
>No faster. It uses fixed point arithmetic. There are different assembler
>files for the different CPU's.

Not entirely true, there are genuine floats in there and
compiling with -f68881 or -fsky does gain you something. It
isn't very much though, because Sun do try to use their
fixed-point stuff wherever possible.
-- 

William Roberts         ARPA: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk  (gw: cs.ucl.edu)
Queen Mary College      UUCP: liam@qmc-cs.UUCP
LONDON, UK              Tel:  01-975 5250