Floating-point bench tests

RHBNC damerell at nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Wed May 17 07:02:48 AEST 1989


There has been a lot of discussion about the speed of floating-point
calculations, but I havent seen any mention of accuracy. Suppose you 
have two routines, both called  "sin":

1:  sin(x) as accurately as the hardware allows,
2:  sin(x) with error about 100 x the error of 1.

I would expect 2 to run about twice as fast as 1, besides being easier to
program. But CPU time is cheap and wrong answers can be very expensive.

I maintain that any worth-while bench test must check the accuracy of the
results as well as speed. 
mark.



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