15 Oct
2005
15 Oct
'05
5:34 a.m.
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:
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)
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.
- Steve
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