IUBio

Pentium is unreliable for floating-point calculations

Tim Cutts tjrc1 at mole.bio.cam.ac.uk
Tue Nov 29 04:03:55 EST 1994


prm at aber.ac.uk (Pedro Mendes) writes:

>4195835.0 - (4195835.0 / 3145727.0 ) * 3145727.0

>The result should be 0, but the pentiums seem to think it is 256...

Bear in mind you should make sure that the program doing the
calculation is using double precision.  It is apparently only double
precision that is affected.

Tim.




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