Quote:
Originally Posted by EricVanWyk
I don't want to belabor the point too heavily, but that future is currently in boxes on its way to the beta test teams. I'm going to follow with a lot of boring technical blah blah blah, but the conclusion is pretty simple to follow.
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Eric (sorry about the k),
To be brief, I wasn't maintaining that fixed point math is faster or would make more sense for most operations on the cRIO. NI's processor selection obviously makes that untrue. Two points remain, however:
1. At some point, we'll hopefully be given access to the FPGA behind the RIO in cRIO. Floating point math is more or less untenable on this FPGA. If a team wants to do fast filtering, averaging, oversampling, etc. with no extra processor load, fixed-point on the FPGA is the way to go. Many interesting applications on the FPGA are going to require some sort of fixed point math, really.
2. Fixed point math is loads faster on processors designed with it in mind and such processors consume less power to do the same amount of work as a floating point processor. I was attempting to point this out so everyone reading the thread didn't simply consign fixed-point to the dustbin of history. There's a reason the big DSP makers are still designing and making new fixed-point DSPs, after all.