Understand floating-point behavior across x86 and Arm architectures

About this Learning Path

Who is this for?

This is a topic for developers who are porting applications from x86 to Arm and want to understand floating-point behavior across these architectures. Both architectures provide reliable and consistent floating-point computation following the IEEE 754 standard.

What will you learn?

Upon completion of this Learning Path, you will be able to:

• Understand that Arm and x86 produce identical results for all well-defined floating-point operations.
• Recognize that differences only occur in special undefined cases permitted by IEEE 754.
• Learn to recognize floating-point differences and make your code portable across architectures.

Prerequisites

Before starting, you will need the following:

• Access to an x86 and an Arm Linux machine.
• Familiarity with floating-point numbers.