Re: netwinder floating point

[Peter Teichmann <lists@peter-teichmann.de>]

Am Donnerstag, 6. Januar 2005 22:02 schrieb Ralph Siemsen:
> Hmm, bit offtopic here, but why would apt or dselect need floating point
> at all?  Surely there are no tasks in either of those programs that
> would need anything but integer math?  Speedup must be somewhere else...

I do not know, just observed it. It was especially noticable when it was 
reading the package list and building the dependency tree. I discovered that 
when installing Debian to my Bast, and was wondering why it was that much 
slower than my RiscPC with dselect/apt. In the end it turned out that the 
only thing that made a difference was FastFPE.

Maybe it is because it is written in perl (or something else?) and uses 
floating point numbers generally, even if they are not needed. But on 
virtually any other processor you do not notice that.

Peter Teichmann