Am 22.05.2011 14:05, schrieb gregjohn:

> You all may save me the embarrassment of asking someone with a more powerful
> computer to run the code to compare. (Um, asking a second person).  While I do
> work in computer hardware, it's on the purely physical side (processing
> defects), not the system architecture side. But would every computer give the
> same image for the floating point errors? Any coolness / art/ science in
> comparing those?

The images are unlikely to differ much: The noise will appear at the 
same level of depth regardless of system architecture. After all, on 
virtually all systems interim results will be stored in IEEE 
double-precision floats, no more and no less.

However, depending on some compiler settings and/or system architecture 
details, the actual noise pattern may differ due to different default 
float rounding mode, differences in the precision for computations (e.g. 
extended double precision on "classic" x86 systems using the x87 
instructions, vs. standard double precision on systems supporting SSE2), 
and maybe other such details.

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