Floating point explanation?

[huffstar]

hey

Anybody ever seen a good webpage explanation of floating point vs. integer arithmetic?? I'm not a math genius and everything I've seen is waaaaayyy over my head, but I'd love to learn more.

 

[jamin]

hey

Anybody ever seen a good webpage explanation of floating point vs. integer arithmetic?? I'm not a math genius and everything I've seen is waaaaayyy over my head, but I'd love to learn more.

Integers are whole numbers (100) Floating points are numbers with a Decimal point (100.001)

Computers have an easy time Calculating Integers and 99.99% of all computers Made have a co-processer to deal with Floating point numbers.
Even the 8088 had a Co-Processer the 8087.
Now a days The co-processer is on the CPU plus have Special algorithms (MMX, SSE, 3DNow, Altivec) to increase performance on Floating Point calculations.