G'day all. Quoting jerzy.karczmarczuk@info.unicaen.fr:
== No, Gentlemen, nobody rational would use Taylor nowadays! It is lousy.
This is correct. Real implementations are far more likely to use the minmax polynomial of some order. However...
Then, a *rational* approximation gives you the same precision with less coeffs. Nowadays the division is not sooo much more expensive than the multiplication, so the efficiency doesn't suffer much.
It might not cost much in the way of time, but it might complicate the implementation a lot. Using polynomials only probably uses a smaller number of transistors, disspiate less power and for all I know might be easier to parallelise than the alternatives. In general, if you can implement FP operations without using microcode, that's a big win. Cheers, Andrew Bromage