Efficient Implementation of Strict Floating-point Semantics

IA-32 processors yield different results of floating-point operations from other processors, even though they are all compliant with IEEE 754. The Java specifications need runtime systems to implement the FP-strict semantics, which other IEEE 754 compliant processors naturally fulfill. We implemented the semantics on a Java Just-in-Time compiler for IA-32. This study reveals that single-precision operations can be performed with precision control bits of the processor staying as double-precision. Performance evaluation demonstrates that our implementation method reduced the performance decline by the semantics down to 40%.