> +Setting the rounding of floating-point operations to less than the default > +80 bits can speed some programs by 2% or more. Note that some mathematical > +libraries assume that extended precision (80 bit) floating-point operations > +are enabled by default; routines in such libraries could suffer significant > +loss of accuracy, typically through so-called "catastrophic cancellation", > +when this option is used to set the precision to less than extended > precision.
Perhaps it should be noted that these libraries are specific to x86 processors, since other processors don't have extended precision. Also, some libraries (e.g. libxslt) assume double precision to be the default and can return incorrect results in extended precision. -- Vincent Lefèvre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
