Re: [linux-audio-dev] Fixed vs. floating point

From: Steve Harris <S.W.Harris@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Fri Oct 14 2005 - 12:34:30 EEST

On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 11:37:30AM +0300, Hannu Savolainen wrote:
> Floating point in turn has 24 bits of precision which is enough for audio.
> The exponent part takes care of scaling while the mantissa stays always
> normalized to the full 24 bit precision. In fact 64 bit precision is used
> for computations and intermediate results inside the FPU (x86 at least).
> In this way the programmer doesn't need to think about the precision (in
> most cases).

Pedantic geekiness warning

Actually there are 25 fixed-point equivalent bits of precision, due to the
implicit 1. Its not much difference, but sometimes it matters.

- Steve
Received on Fri Oct 14 16:15:05 2005

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