IBM Adding Hardware Decimal Digit Support

[exit2dos]

Thought this was interesting:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6124451.html?tag=zdfd.newsfeed

Power6 can count to 10--and perform numerous other mathematical operations--with the decimal digits 0 through 9 rather than the binary digits of 0 and 1 used by conventional computers.

While the chip is binary, it is offering hardware support for decimal digits (0-9). I wonder if this will be a trend.

 

[corvetteguy]

Thought this was interesting:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6124451.html?tag=zdfd.newsfeed

Power6 can count to 10--and perform numerous other mathematical operations--with the decimal digits 0 through 9 rather than the binary digits of 0 and 1 used by conventional computers.

While the chip is binary, it is offering hardware support for decimal digits (0-9). I wonder if this will be a trend.

What would be the effects of this? Would some things be more efficient or is this just a novelty?

"hey look, mine can count to ten!"

 

[exit2dos]

Well, for professional accounting:

precision problems can crop up when computers translate numbers into binary to perform a calculation, then translate back to the decimal system to present answers. For example, 10 percent of $1.50 should be 15 cents, not 14.9999 cents, he said. Consequently, regulations require that some tax and government applications perform math using decimal-based calculations, McCredie said.

Also:

about a little more than half of numeric stored in commercial databases is decimal

"There are a lot of software packages so people can run decimal math," he said, but performing the instructions in hardware speeds up processing by a factor of two to seven

Still slower than binary though. I don't expect it to make a far-reaching or earth-shattering differnece to the CPU world, but for accounting/financial systems - this could be a big deal.

 

[carlhungis]

They are also planning on releasing a 5ghz server chip.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127433-pg,1-RSS,RSS/article.html

"Forthcoming Power6 chip pushes speed to 5.0GHz." Pretty darn fast.....