Re: Motion P1788/M0047:Motion45Amendment-1 -- discussion period begins
I vote NO on M0047:Motion45Amendment-1
... for the same reasons I voted for Motion 45:
1. CA can be efficient only in hardware, so that a requirement would
make sense only if hardware implementations were common or there
would be any plan to make them common. But there are currently no
hardware implementations, hardware implementations in the past have
been dropped, and no vendors have shown interest in implementing CA
in hardware. And in software, there are better alternatives to CA.
And CA doesn't fit well with modern computing (e.g. parallelism) as
it would need a lot of communication.
2. If CA's goal is to implement other operations recommended or
required by P1788, it is not up to the standard to require some
particular implementation. A standard specifies the behavior,
not how features are implemented internally.
3. There are better alternatives to EDP: exactness is not needed in
applications, possibly except in the worst cases, where there are
other ways to deal with such problems. In particular, the correctly
rounded dot product can be implemented without having to compute
the exact value.
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@xxxxxxxxxx> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)