Re: [PATCH] Fortran: add Fortran 2018 IEEE_{MIN,MAX} functions

[Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de>]

Hi FX,

>> Having a POWER system isn't enough, it also needs the IBM "advance
>> toolchain", and (at least with current distros, which default to
>> ibm long double), you need to dance counterclockwise three
>> times... I mean you need to invoke configure with some special magic
> 
> Thanks for the frank description, Thomas. To be honest, it reinforces > my feeling from when this was originally proposed and added: why> are 
we doing so much extra work for a feature that is used by> such a tiny 
fraction of our user base.

Well, I can tell you why I helped in this:  I like non-standard
architectures, I like 128-bit floats, and I like fast execution
speed of programs.  And if POWER having this goes any way towards
pushing Intel, AMD, or ARM towards having 128-bit floating point...
well, I would like that a lot.

And the need for all this magic will go away once distributions switch
to IEEE QP float as default.

By the way, if anybody wants to play with it, there should be no
problem in getting an account on the the OSL (virtual) machine
I ran this on.

As for the speed difference: A simple matrix multiplication has around
50 MFlops on my home box and around 250 MFlops on the POWER9 box I am
testing this on.  POWER10 should double that.

Best regards

	Thomas