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On the PC side, most developers stopped predominantly using fixed point for high performance code somewhere in the Pentium 1-3 era. For 486 class systems it was
by vardump 2y ago
On the PC side, most developers stopped predominantly using fixed point for high performance code somewhere in the Pentium 1-3 era. For 486 class systems it was still pretty useful.
Other than on retro systems, fixed point is still useful in smaller microcontrollers.
- pjmlp 2y agoMichael Abrash books contain information on these kinds of optimizations, which were exactly on this transition point, as timeframe.
- VyseofArcadia 2y agoA buddy of mine and I are working on a weekend project together. We recently realized that we don't need all that much precision, just a little, and switching from doubles or floats to 16-bit fixed point in our main data structure actually makes it small enough to fit an instance in a typical cache line (< 64 bytes). Completely unnecessary for our target platform but deeply satisfying.
- vardump 2y agoFor performance sensitive code memory bandwidth is very often the limiting factor, thus compressing values tends to make a lot of sense. The number of CPU cores is increasing much faster than memory bandwidth. So not necessarily completely unnecessary.
- VyseofArcadia 2y agoI expect it will have some effect given that we anticipate having ~1000 instances of that data structure alive at worst case, at least dozens at any given time.
- twoodfin 2y agoA few years before that era, I was having a lot of fun with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractint