Future instruction set: AVX-512

Re:Future instruction set: AVX-512 by drewcrawford on Wednesday October 09, 2013 @11:02PM (#6525421)

I'm sorry, are you asking for what purpose a scientist would need to multiply by a power of ten? Converting between units in scientific notation? Doing base 10 logarithms? Calculating things in decibels?

Maybe I have misunderstood the question.

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Re:Future instruction set: AVX-512 by jey on Thursday October 10, 2013 @01:39AM (#6525837)

The original post that started this thread was saying that chips should support decimal floating point natively in silicon instead of only base-2 floating point. Yes, those are different things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE754#Basic_formats

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Re:Future instruction set: AVX-512 by drewcrawford on Friday October 11, 2013 @07:20PM (#6536454)

I am well aware of the difference between base 2 and base 10.

You asked "why not just use doubles?" And my answer is "because one often multiplies by powers of ten."

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