<tholen@antispam.ham> wrote in message
news:468b04e9$0$16592$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
> Vista writes:
>
>> I guess Intel Visual Fortran or other Fortran has natural support for the
>> quadruple precision.
>
> What do you mean by "natural" support? My concept involves having a
> 128-bit floating point unit and a compiler that can use it. When the
> requested precision exceeds the capabilities of the hardware, it needs
> to be emulated in software, which can be extremely slow.
>

But is there a 128-bit floating point unit in Intel CPU and supported by the
compiler?

And how slow is the software emulation?

I would imagine that the "double double" (quad) will be still much faster
than multiple/high precision package...