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What? Pretty much every general-purpose calculation on your computer that isn’t an integer is done with FP64. AI may not use it and games may prefer FP32 for ma
by pclmulqdq 2mo ago
What? Pretty much every general-purpose calculation on your computer that isn’t an integer is done with FP64. AI may not use it and games may prefer FP32 for many things, but your CPU certainly does a ton of FP64 work.
- pertymcpert 2mo agoWhich workloads?
- pclmulqdq 2mo agoLiterally every workload not named above. It’s the default for a non-integer number. * Web rendering and almost all web apps (see the JS number type) * Most things in a game not done on the GPU * Audio processing * Most GUI processing/rendering * Every miscellaneous/scalar calculation these days Believe it or not, on a CPU this adds up to a lot more than the work you get doing AI processing.
- hajile 2mo agoJS converts most number into 31-bit ints internally (which is why it’s so fast). GUI work often prefers int or f32. You have a point about games, but the CPU is seldom the limiting factor. Very few people are handling raw audio. For the rest, codec hardware beats everything else by a massive margin. Being good at floats matters, but even float-heavy code generally has way more integers than floats making integer performance king.
- pclmulqdq 2mo agoQuite a lot of web rendering is done with non-integer JS Number types, aka FP64. You are right that there’s a 31-bit integer optimization, but once you have a non-integer in the mix, it’s FP64. Many GUIs some time ago would use FP32, but in 2026 there’s a lot more FP64 out there than you give credit for.
- pertymcpert 2mo agoRight but I've never seen these fp64 computations show up hot in a profile. I'm not saying they're not used but most of the work in a general computer usage in terms of profiles is in scalar integer code.