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One thing I always wondered about this: why was he using the FPU? These all seem like integer operations.



Look here: http://www.mersenne.org/various/math.php at the Lucas-Lehmer test which uses floating point FFT's to square large numbers. I am not sure if that is what is was doing originally, but I suspect it was.

We used that prime95 program from mersenne.org quite a bit in testing because it was very close to our best max-power test for processors. It would keep both the FP and integer ALUs saturated and validated all the results so if anything was wrong it would start complaining.


Explained in the second question of his FAQ: http://www.trnicely.net/pentbug/pentbug.html




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