There aren't a lot of advantages to putting quadruple precision into the hardware. Typically with numeric code you don't run out of exponent space you run into precision limits. To increase precision you can use software techniques like double-double representation. This doubles precision and keeps the exponent range the same at the cost of increased numbers of instructions.
The real action is in FMA (fused multiply-add) instructions. These instructions do two operations then a correct rounding of the result (e.g. round(a*b+c)). FMA in hardware is great. It lets you write functions with provably tight errors or even provably correct rounding of the result. More and more platforms are providing FMA [1].
Comments
There aren't a lot of advantages to putting quadruple precision into the hardware. Typically with numeric code you don't run out of exponent space you run into precision limits. To increase precision you can use software techniques like double-double representation. This doubles precision and keeps the exponent range the same at the cost of increased numbers of instructions.
The real action is in FMA (fused multiply-add) instructions. These instructions do two operations then a correct rounding of the result (e.g. round(a*b+c)). FMA in hardware is great. It lets you write functions with provably tight errors or even provably correct rounding of the result. More and more platforms are providing FMA [1].
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiply%E2%80%93accumulate_ope...