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

From: Jens M Andreasen <jens.andreasen@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Sat Oct 15 2005 - 10:34:25 EEST

On Fri, 2005-10-14 at 10:34 +0100, Steve Harris wrote:
> 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.
>

With so many experts around, it would be nice to have a small, effecient
16bit -> float, as well as a float -> 16bit (uhm, right, Intel hardware
will do this for you, but say you are someahere else)

> - Steve

-- 
Received on Sat Oct 15 12:15:05 2005

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