4 ms·
Why is floating point faster?
by amelius 2mo ago
Why is floating point faster?
- tverbeure 2mo agoIt’s a more important use case, so CPU vendors throw more resources at it.
- ithkuil 2mo agoThe mantissa has also less bits, so the actual operation is cheaper, which affects latency.
- ted_dunning 2mo agoAs the article says, some processors only have an instruction that produces 1 bit of quotient per cycle. This gives a variable time for integer division which can be longer than the time it takes to do a floating point operation. This sort of limitation has a long pedigree and is surprisingly common. For instance, the CDC 6000 series had no general purpose integer arithmetic unit. The DEC Alpha had no integer divide and the standard RISC-5 spec also omits it. Same for low-end ARM chips.