hn • r/hackernews
Comment on: The Prospects for 128 Bit Processors ( John Mashey SGI 1995)
Personally I'm disappointed 128-bit floating point (quadruple precision) never properly made it into CPU's (sure it appeared in some niche ones here and there, but not in what we actually use today). After all, in the 1980's they had 80-bit ones, it's not even that far off, and they had millions times less transistors then.While probably niche and applications that need higher precision using their own custom types anyway, they'd allow cool stuff like easy to program fractals with much higher detail than now. But also, less precision loss in many applications.