@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place
Post #2797255
2026-04-14 21:58 UTC
@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place @zeux@mastodon.gamedev.place @lisyarus@mastodon.gamedev.place For most of the 80s and 90s we had a bunch of very different evaluation strategies, at least three:
1. basic RISCs with just +,-,*,/,sqrt and either only float or float+double but no extended format (and often limited support for traps etc.)
2. RISCs with FMAs (usually of the "almost everything reduces to FMA variety", e.g. the RS/6000, PPC and descendants)
3. M68k and x87 with internal extended precision and extra exponent range.
Replies (1)
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@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-04-14 22:00
@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place @zeux@mastodon.gamedev.place @lisyarus@mastodon.gamedev.place all three of these provided reasonable error bounds in the same ballpark but disagreed on the exact results, and simulating each of those with any of the others was impractically expensive. Hence compilers doing a best-effort mapping and language standards not saying much on the topic. What IEEE thinks about it, nobody really asked in the first place.