29.11.1. x86 x87 FPU vs SIMD

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1844669/benefits-of-x87-over-sse

Modern x86 has two main ways of doing floating point operations:

Advantages of FPU:

  • present in old CPUs, while SSE2 is only required in x86-64

  • contains some instructions no present in SSE, e.g. trigonometric

  • higher precision: FPU holds 80 bit Intel extension, while SSE2 only does up to 64 bit operations despite having the 128-bit register

In GCC, you can choose between them with -mfpmath=.

↑ Up: x86 x87 FPU instructions | ⌂ Home: Linux Kernel Module Cheat | Next: x86 SIMD →