I think we should be thinking again the floating-point implementations on CPUs. I guess hacks like this directly on hardware would double the battery life on mobile devices. IEEE level accuracy is rarely needed either in number precision or computation accuracy. I guess fast IEEE square root isn't either space or energy efficient on silicon.
I disagree -- the amount of silicon dedicated to this type of operation is miniscule compared to the caches on modern processors. Removing hardware floating point reciprocal square root isn't going to have any noticeable effect on power consumption.
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I think we should be thinking again the floating-point implementations on CPUs. I guess hacks like this directly on hardware would double the battery life on mobile devices. IEEE level accuracy is rarely needed either in number precision or computation accuracy. I guess fast IEEE square root isn't either space or energy efficient on silicon.
I disagree -- the amount of silicon dedicated to this type of operation is miniscule compared to the caches on modern processors. Removing hardware floating point reciprocal square root isn't going to have any noticeable effect on power consumption.