Not to be rude, but this is a silly question. 128 bits per texel. That means more bandwidth is consumed reading the data into the texture cache. That also means the texture cache holds fewer texels. Of course there's a performance hit.
That's ok, I'm a bit of a silly guy...plus I really ain't anywhere near as educated about these things as most of the people here. Asking silly questions I still find to be one of the best ways to learn silly things. Thanks, I thought as much but I really didn't know.
Except the storage order is platform dependent. s<mantissa bits>e<exponent bits> is based around how you write the numbers in scientific notation (i.e. mathematics - a universal language). 3e6, -2.314e1, 6.626e-34, ...
<OT> OK, I can identify the last one as a physical constant, but not the two former. Are they? </OT>
I didn't think any of them were physical constants... Update: Heh, n/m...that last one's "h" ... I usually use "h-bar"
Blah, you beat me to the reply before I could edit. Yes, it's Planck's Constant, "h", that is frequently referred to in physics as the smallest possible unit of phase space (or something similar). Phase space is a six-dimensional space including both position and momentum. You can see this in the uncertainty principle (one manifestation of which is): dxdp ~ h (Where the ~ means this is an approximate equation...there are more rigorous ones...which is where, if I remember correctly, the h-bar comes from, it's h/2pi) I guess the fact that I know all about how "h" is used (well, at least how it has been used in the physics I've taken so far), and yet can't recognize the number when I see it has something to do with the way physics is taught these days....
Couple of comments regarding my older comments: 1) R3x0 can write out its internal format as an external 128b, configured as four 32b SPFP values. 2) When the R3x0 writes out that format and reads it back for internal use, the values obtained back match the ones written out (no precision loss). This is not wrong. 3) The main issue with writing out 128b/pixel is memory bandwidth; the BW hit limits you to at most 4 pixels/clock (assuming all BW is used for the writes), but performance is, I believe, actually lower (memory efficiency cannot be 100%, due to page crossing, R/W switch, refreshes, etc...). I've never measured this performance.
The last is Planck's constant, the middle is -e^pi, and the first is a typo (was supposed to be 3e8 - the speed of light).
Well at least the commonly used value in miles has more significant digits! So many people write 300,000 km/s (or 3e8 m/s as above) when really they should write 3.00e5 or 3.00e8. P.S. Here's the exact value: 299,792,458 m/s. Yes, it's exact because the meter is define as "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second."
Then how is the second defined? After all, the rotation of the Earth is slowing down by a very small amount over time...so the value, "1/86400th of one revolution of the Earth" is not a constant value... Oh, and one question...what is the use of -e^pi? I've seen complex exponentials with a "pi" in them (-e^i*pi would be 1), but not real exponentials...
Bleh, significant digits are BS too There is no use that I'm aware of. I wasn't aware I had to use universal constants when giving examples of scientific notation I just mashed some buttons to get an irrational number.
You've forgotten about atomic clocks A second is a certain number of vibrations of light emitted by radioactive Cesium. *digs around for link* Ahh here we go. Dunno. I saw that years ago (as well as pi^e) and could never see a real use for it.
Actually NIST has developed an "all optical" clock that uses optical wavelengths (Terahertz) and beats the best cesium atomic clocks by a factor of 1,000.
"English"? No, "Imperial", as in the Roman Empire! That is how old it is. Of course is doesn't help that the USA got many of the measurements wrong
e^pi is transcendental, but the status of pi^e is still unknown. Therefore, it provides works for some mathematicians