[PD] denormals

[Matteo Sisti Sette]

Hi,

I may be missing something, but...

I don't think it should be any surprise that intels and other processors 
"still" have the denormal problem. AFAIU, a processor may handle denormals 
in a more or less efficient way, but it will always be quite much slower 
when handling denormals than when handling normal numbers, and it can't be 
expected to avoid or eliminate them, since in applications other than DSP 
they may be useful (otherwise they wouldn't exsist at all).

We shouldn't wait for the cpu manufacturers to "solve" this problem: it is 
the DSP application's responsibility to avoid denormals (as other dsp 
applications do), by using some technique such as those described in the 
references you have already quoted.
And when I say "the DSP application", I mean in this case PD, since I think 
it is a low-level issue that shouldn't be addressed at the patch level.

By browsing the archives I saw that some general solutions were proposed 
years ago which allowed to make PD denormal-safe. I don't have the
knowledge to understand them or their related problems in depth, so forgive 
me if I ask a stupid question:
Why didn't those lines of code become part of PD??
Didn't they really solve the problem? Or was there any drawback?
Or is there any good reason for not getting rid of denormals?




Thanks
m. 

 
 
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