Comment by ErroneousBosh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ErroneousBosh | Hacker News Reader

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It's probably because you have to have weird precision issues where the numbers are calculated ever so slightly differently, and some other effect like a guard being slightly too close and getting clipped by a door where that difference matters.

I debugged some software synthesizer code a while back (like 20 years or so now I think of it) where a build of it on one platform failed because of a precision bug. I can't remember the details, but there was a lot of "works fine on my machine" type discussion around it. Anyway it relied on a crude simulation of an RC circuit reaching very close to 0 asymptotically to trigger a state change, but on something like 64-bit Intel with a specific processor it never quite made it low enough to trip the comparison because of something to do with not flushing denormals.

From an electronic standpoint, making it simulate "it's high enough" as being about 0.7 and " it's low enough" being about 0.01 was far closer to the instrument they were trying to simulate, and making it massively imprecise like that got it going on everything.

Is funny because the only code I have read that flushed denormals was in synth code.

Denormals in audio code are kind of the "perfect storm", because they take ages to deal with - you're suddenly back into softfloat land - and because you have to deal with many thousands of them in a few hundred microseconds.

We take how fast hardware floating point is for granted. I suspect it would be interesting to compare something compiled with softfloat with a normal benchmark and see just how bad it is.

It's a great reason to do your DSP code in fixed-point, which is just integer with a couple of steps you have to write down on paper to keep straight until you get to the end. Or, I do, because I suck at arithmetic. Just do it all in machine-length signed ints, and forget all the mystical world of tiny tiny floating point values ;-)

Fixed floating point has been a mistery to me, and to be fair floting point is too. I know digital synths like Virus or Waldorf all used 24 bit fixed point math DSP.

I remember this dps site with lost of c and delphi code, there is where I found what denormals are.

Nowdays I dont see DPS code dealing with denormals. Maybe the CPU does not have to do it in software anymore? I don't really know.

> I remember this dps site with lost of c and delphi code, there is where I found what denormals are.

musicdsp.org?

> Fixed floating point has been a mistery to me, and to be fair floting point is too. I know digital synths like Virus or Waldorf all used 24 bit fixed point math DSP.

If you imagine scaling a 16-bit value for like a volume control from 0 to 1, then you'd have maybe 32767 for maximum positive, and -32768 for maximum negative. You could convert those to floats, multiply, and convert back to a 16-bit integer.

But you don't want to use floats, you want to keep it all integer. So you make the volume range be from 0 to 255, and multiply your 16-bit value by that. Now you've got a 24-bit value, with a "binary point" between bits 7 and 8. Now the output is way off scale for the 16-bit DAC but if we chop off the fractional part by just shifting the result of the multiply left 8 bits, you've now got your volume control.

Some DSPs will actually do a 16 bit by 16 bit multiply which just discards the lower 16 bits of the result, with the assumption being that both 16-bit values mean "-1 to 1".

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