Torture tests: what do they mean?

[jebem]

(05-14-2014 09:39 PM)Jim Horn Wrote:  Alan Sultan's CORDIC article is a fine introduction. It misses one important simplification, though - instead of multiplying the result of the rotations by K, you can start with (K,0) as the initial vector. Then *no* multiplication is needed other than the binary shifts and adds. This was covered in the HP Journal article on the HP35 algorithms. Pretty nifty!

Very cleaver, indeed!
My digital electronics background is coming back to my mind now...
Thanks for all people sharing their knowledge and thoughts here (so far: Paul, Pauli, David, Pauli, Dieter, HP67, Manolo, Jim). I'm learning a lot from you, as I'm not a mathematician by education, but I have the basics to follow what is being said.

So, apparently the big three (HP, CASIO and TI) were using CORDIC variants in the beginning, keeping absolute secrecy (and patents?) about the inner implementation details.

But now in 2014, when we have so much more processor power (ALU and FPU) in convenient small low power packages... What algorithms are in use at hardware and software level, that combined, can support our trigonometric functions?
Do they still maintain secrecy after all this years?
Or in more than 50 years nothing was really created to beat or at least give an alternative to CORDIC algorithms?
I know that 50 years is just a time tick in science. Technology is a different matter, however.