Newsgroups: comp.arch
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: [really, CISC-to-the-max]
Message-ID: <1989Aug18.183622.26556@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <38139@stellar.UUCP> <24889@winchester.mips.COM> <846@babbage.acc.virginia.edu> <21353@cup.portal.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 89 18:36:22 GMT

In article <21353@cup.portal.com> mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson) writes:
>I remember reading in an old AFIPS paper that von Neumann believed computers
>of the future would all have the SQRT instruction, because of the importance
>of square root in coordinate geometry.

And somebody was listening. :-)  IEEE floating point implementations are
required to have a square-root primitive (although it doesn't actually
have to be in hardware, as the hardware/software boundary is left to the
implementor).  As I recall, the observation was that it's not significantly
more difficult than division when done in hardware, but is a pain to do
accurately in software and is important to many algorithms.
-- 
V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu