Re: [eigen] sse transcendental functions

[Gael Guennebaud <gael.guennebaud@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 2:11 PM, Rohit Garg <rpg.314@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I was looking through the svn log and i found this
>
> r944892 | ggael | 2009-03-26 18:20:24 +0530 (Thu, 26 Mar 2009) | 6 lines
>
> * enable vectorization of sin, cos, etc. by default with an option to
>  disable them (-DEIGEN_FAST_MATH=0)
> * add a specialization of MatrixBase::operator*(RealScalar) for fast
>  "matrix of complex" times scalar products (even more useful for
>  autodiff scalar types)
>
> 1) It could be obvious but what does the DEIGEN_FAST_MATH macro do?

this is explained in the doxy doc, just on top of EIGEN_FAST_MATH,
basically it allows you to disable some optimizations which might
degrades the accuracy

> 2) do you feel there is place for fast implementations of such
> transcendental functions in eigen? I think we should clearly advertise
> in the documentation that the SSE version is for 'fast-operations' as
> seems to be the case. BTW, automagically enabling these when the user
> compiles with -ffast-math would be cool.

well, currently the only problem of accuracy is for sin/cos and single
precision floating point values out of the range [-8000 : 8000]. In
such cases, the error is still lower than taking the same value modulo
2pi and then call the glibc sin/cos function. So, really, I think, it
is safe to enable them by default.

> 3) any particular reason why the sincos4f from the Julian's sources
> hasn't made it in yet?

because currently there is no sincos function in eigen.

> --
> Rohit Garg
>
> http://rpg-314.blogspot.com/
>
> Senior Undergraduate
> Department of Physics
> Indian Institute of Technology
> Bombay
>
>
>