[A83] Re: x86 floating points [OT]
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[A83] Re: x86 floating points [OT]
At 19:16 2002-01-27, you wrote:
>You all know the 83 series have FP's up to Xe99, but what
>about the processor of the PC you're looking at?
>If you try to calculate some very high multiplications
>on Windows's calculator (like 3,23232... e64231 * the same)
>it takes quite a lot of time. But I'm not that stupid to
>try to find the max that way. So... Any ideas?
As far as I could read in a text about IEEE floats that I got from a
friend, a 64 bit float on a modern PC can hold up to approximatly 10^308.
That ofcourse doesn't mean you can't calculate higher numbers (as you saw
in the windows calculator), it just means you can't calculate higher
numbers in hardware with a single instruction.
with the right software, (and enough time) you can calculate any number,
with the only limitation of available memory.
for example, the z80 has, as you know, absolutly no support for floating
point numbers, but still you have up to Xe99 on the ti83.
You don't need a fpu to do floating point, it just helps :)
//Olle
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