Java Grande Forum Floating Point Proposals I
Design Goals/Requirements:
- Good Performance on most processors
- High performance sometimes
- exact reproducibility sometimes
- access to IEEE floating point features
We propose three modes of floating point execution
strictfp: Reproducible results as in current default
new default: Exploit natural hardware (extended exponent in Intel and fused multiply add)
associatefp: Allow conventional compiler optimizations
with new Intel algorithm, strictfp will be a little more than 2 times slower than default; associatefp gains will be algorithm dependent (regular problems will have greatest gain)