Win64 Issues as a End-User Rant

Jon 'maddog' Hall maddog at li.org
Sat Feb 17 16:47:01 EST 2007


>   Remember, we're talking English, and where I come from, "commercial"
> is anything that involves businesses making money.
>
Buildings cost millions of dollars and are sold commercially, but the
engineering of them is considered "scientific" computing for a lot of
the reasons we have discussed and more.

Typically "scientific" computing also is more heavily reliant on
floating point arithmetic, and therefore floating point processors are
more prevalent that in "commercial" computing.

In early Unix systems, there was very, very little that was done with
floating point, particularly in the operating system itself, since a lot
of systems did not have floating point accelerators.  Early Unix systems
were aimed toward text processing (the first PDP-11 to run "Unix" was
funded by Bell Lab's Law department so they could work on legal briefs).
This needed very little floating point processing.

Later on, as Unix moved more into the more scientific space it developed
needs for floating point work, and support of floating point
accelerators.

md



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