Hi,
I would like to ask a question on floating-point numbers.
Floating-point numbers have sign, exponent and fraction bits, and their arithmetic is significantly more involving than fixed-point arithmetic. On processors without floating-point ALU, C standard libraries however still include functions like sin(), sinf(), sinl() , and they could all be executed successfully. Without floating-point ALU support, are all arithmetic steps (shifting, comparison, fraction and exponent arithmetic) done in software? I mean, being translated into primitive instructions and then executed on integer-type ALUs?
If true, I guess it would be significantly slower than on processors with floating-point ALU. Is there any quantitative measure, on C6000 and ARM processors for example, on the performance of floating-point arithmetic?
Zheng
