Understand floating-point behavior across x86 and Arm architectures

About this Learning Path

Who is this for?

This is an introductory 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 best practices for writing portable floating-point code across architectures.
• Apply appropriate precision levels for portable results.

Prerequisites

Before starting, you will need the following:

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