Float vs Double Performance

by

On x86 processors, at least, float and double will each be converted to a 10-byte real by the FPU for processing. The FPU doesn’t have separate processing units for the different floating-point types it supports.

The age-old advice that float is faster than double applied 100 years ago when most CPUs didn’t have built-in FPUs (and few people had separate FPU chips), so most floating-point manipulation was done in software. On these machines (which were powered by steam generated by the lava pits), it was faster to use floats. Now the only real benefit to floats is that they take up less space (which only matters if you have millions of them).

More Related Contents:

  1. Best way to reverse a string
  2. What’s the fastest way to read a text file line-by-line?
  3. Is DateTime.Now the best way to measure a function’s performance? [closed]
  4. How costly is .NET reflection?
  5. Performance differences between debug and release builds
  6. Performance surprise with “as” and nullable types
  7. C# Sort and OrderBy comparison
  8. How to get object size in memory? [duplicate]
  9. Does C# optimize the concatenation of string literals?
  10. How to call .NET methods from Excel VBA?
  11. LINQ: Not Any vs All Don’t
  12. Exact time measurement for performance testing [duplicate]
  13. String interning in .Net Framework – What are the benefits and when to use interning
  14. Resolve assembly references from another folder
  15. Try-catch speeding up my code?
  16. What are major differences between C# and Java?
  17. Should we always include a default constructor in the class?
  18. Why is LINQ .Where(predicate).First() faster than .First(predicate)?
  19. SQLite .NET performance, how to speed up things?
  20. How to force a number to be in a range in C#? [duplicate]
  21. How accurate is System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch?
  22. Why does C#/CLR not support method override co/contra-variance?
  23. .NET 4.0 and the dreaded OnUserPreferenceChanged Hang
  24. Warm-up when calling methods in C#
  25. Why is processing a sorted array slower than an unsorted array?
  26. Are static indexers not supported in C#? [duplicate]
  27. What is the maximum length of a C#/CLI identifier?
  28. XmlSerializer Performance Issue when Specifying XmlRootAttribute
  29. Simplest way to make cross-appdomain call?
  30. Fastest implementation of log2(int) and log2(float)

Leave a Comment