Re: 'Big Integers' -re a Fall06 thread ADDLC

["Walden H. Leverich" <WaldenL@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Sounds like it will do floating point operations directly on decimal
> data, to eliminate the 14.999999 approximations caused by conversions
to
> and from binary.  It should also greatly reduce the number of machine
> instructions generated. 

Per Dr. Frank at NEUGC Tuesday night the mainframe folks "demanded"
decimal math on the chip as part of moving the mainframe to Power6.
You're exactly correct, there will now be chip instructions that perform
decimal math -- should make it _much_ faster. Um, and the 4-5 GHZ clock
speed won't hurt either.

-Walden

PS. Disclaimer -- As Dr. Frank pointed out at the start of his talk,
we'd all had access to the open bar so we might have imagined anything
he said. <G>