Sqrt on Sparc

[km at mathcs.emory.edu]

I remember seeing somewhere that the Sun 4/2xx FPU-1 does sqrt in
software, but the FPU-2 did it in hardware.

Now the questions:

What about the 4/60 and 4/3xx. Software or hardware sqrt's?

What is the speedup factor for hardware sqrt?

What is the easiest way to get the C compiler to use the hardware sqrt's
if they exist? Apparently there is more to it than replacing sqrt with
Fsqrt in the source, and putting /usr/lib/libm.il on the command line.

I just did a benchmark that showed a Sun 3/60 with inline 68881 sqrts (in
Fortran), was twice as fast as a Sun 4/280 without inline sqrts (in either
C or Fortran).