alt Hacker NewsI would add than SSE1 and SSE2 are now required parts of AMD64 instruction set. All 64-bit PC processors are required to support them both. For that reason, modern compilers are ignoring x87 FPU when building 64-bit binaries. Instead, they compile all float and double arithmetic into SSE1 and SSE2 instructions, respectively.
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Extended double has some niche and quite useful for its application properties. You can for instance simulate 128 bit floats more easily with it.
Which is not to say that they are necessarily auto-vectorizing. You know wassup when you see vaddsd instead of vaddpd. And ideally you'd use AVX-512 to saturate a modern cache line if you can afford to drop support for the older devices.
Compilers like GCC and Clang treat C's "long double" type by default as 80-bit wide and result in x87 generated code. This can be overridden to use either 64-bit or 128-bit floating point values.
Take a look at the micro-architecture levels. x86-64-v1 contains all the instructions that the original AMD64 and compatible Intel CPUs supported. v2 is all the SSE levels, v3 is AVX and AVX2, v4 is AVX-512.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_level...