[Simh] Looking for a milestone

[Paul Koning]

> On Oct 17, 2016, at 5:29 PM, Kevin Handy <khandy21yo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> How close are the simh emulators to the real hardware's floating point? How exct is the emulation of FPU's?
> Does simh emulate the real hardware close enough that you can use it to analyze the original hardware floating point processors? (For those that actually had FPUs instead of doing it in software).
> Or does it do it using "modern" methods (IEEE style FPUs) that could calculate different results than the original hardware did?

I would hope not.  It's up to the individual emulator.  But a lot of machines have float designs vastly different from IEEE, possibly including more significant bits than commonly found, or much larger exponent ranges.

> It;s probably not a big deal for most users, but if the simh FPU hardware  might operate any different;y than the real hardware it should at least be documented somewhere.

Yes, it would be good for the machine-specific document in the SIMH docs set to answer that question.

	paul