Nice explanation for the less technically inclined. 🙂
I feel to have to add my 0.02€ though 😉
@mas wrote:
6. As these CPUs without a FPU are quite rare that tremor patch is not mainstream. On all “normal” CPUs the FPU version works perfect and better than the tremor one.
From wikipedia:
The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit CPU architecture in the world. The ARM architecture is used in about 3/4 of all 32 bit processors sold.
(…)
As of January 2008, over 10 billion ARM cores have been built, and iSuppli predicts that 5 billion a year will ship in 2011.
Most ARM-based processors do not have floating point capability. It’s only available through a numeric co-processor, or special instruction sets for signal processing, for instance.
I couldn’t get numbers on Intel or AMD processors built so far, but I doubt they go even as high as 1 billion.
Just to put “rare” into perspective. 😉