Q: floating-point, losslessness from http://www.wavpack.com/technical. Options

[Porcus]

I quote:

I have decided to not use any floating-point arithmetic in WavPack's data path because I believe that integer operations are less susceptible to subtle chip to chip variations that could corrupt the lossless nature of the compression, the recent Pentium floating point bug being a blatant example of this.

Is this obsoleted, in the sense that Bryant has found that one can now trust floating-point arithmetic, or does it mean that even floating-point .WV files are created using fixed-point arithmetic, without any use of the processor's floating-point internals?


(Edited for clarification.)

This post has been edited by Porcus: Feb 17 2012, 17:37

[saratoga]

Is this obsoleted, or does it mean that one does not use the processor's floating-point internals?

I don't know about wavpack specifically, but lossless formats tend not to use floating point since addition and multiplication is subject to a somewhat difficult to predict rounding error, which complicates using them for lossless compression.