diff NEWS @ 20000:d20dd211cc89

Enable float truncation by default for octave builds. * NEWS: Announce change. * configure.ac: Change configure option to --disable-float-truncate, and enable float truncation by default.
author Rik <rik@octave.org>
date Thu, 19 Mar 2015 07:00:11 -0700
parents 656cb18bf858
children 72ccbd36e23c
line wrap: on
line diff
--- a/NEWS	Wed Mar 18 21:00:51 2015 -0400
+++ b/NEWS	Thu Mar 19 07:00:11 2015 -0700
@@ -316,6 +316,17 @@
     advantage of OpenMP if desired.  This can be disabled when building
     Octave with the configure option --disable-openmp.
 
+ ** Octave now automatically truncates intermediate calculations done with
+    floating point values to 64 bits.  Some hardware math co-processors, such
+    as the x87, maintain extra precision, but this leads to disagreements in
+    calculations when compared to reference implementations in software using
+    the IEEE standard for double precision.  There was no measurable
+    performance impact to this change, but it may be disabled with the
+    configure option --disable-float-truncate.  MinGW and Cygwin platforms,
+    as well as GCC compilers >= 5.0 require this feature.  Non-x87 hardware,
+    or hardware using SSE options exclusively, can disable float truncation
+    if desired.
+
 ---------------------------------------------------------
 
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