Euler Identity in Home

[Manolo Sobrino]

(04-27-2014 10:59 PM)ColinJDenman Wrote:  I hesitate to say, but perhaps this, in the end, is the point I've tried to make. The Prime has a CPU bundle more powerful than the laptop I was using 10-15 years ago. That laptop managed to run Windows, and, grudgingly, MathCAD.

Is the firmware really up to that power -- it doesn't seem remarkably fast nor deliver superior results to preceding HPs. I tend to think the home calculator is a cut and paste job of the scientific calculator HP has used for some years.

The algorithm you refer to was targeted for considerably more primitive hardware of decades ago. Applying it to the Prime is developmentally cost effective, but hardly innovative or making good use of the progress in hardware.

Nor is the decision to ignore the chip's built-in SD card support and other features that could have been made available for a few bucks more. See the Raspberry Pi B for the hardware one could get for a low price. Note especially the 512MB RAM.

HP could do better. It used to be a hallmark that they did, before the beancounters infested the world. Other suppliers such as Casio seem to be willing to make more radical efforts to bring the calculator up to date. Unlike other posters, I think the calculator with a dedicated keyboard and instant availability is still a sensible ergonomic computing niche.

I was talking about the Saturn calculators. And it gets funnier, because I suspect (with good reasons) that the way they could get the CORDIC to do that was by storing double precision values in the algorithm tables. That is, using 24 significant digits of Pi internally. At least, that's what TI did with the 68 to improve range reduction, and hence it can give you very accurate results for sin(integer*pi`14) that match those of the HPs... then they went back to using only single precision values of Pi and that's why they now get zero and have worse range reduction. BTW, the HPs have excellent range reduction . You can't trust calculator designers to tell you everything

I don't believe this is a straight cut & paste job, because that would mean that they're emulating Kinpo emulating Saturn... I don't think so. I guess they're recreating an ideal HP 12 digit calculator (that nevertheless works under the hood effectively with 24 to give you whatever 12 it couldn't otherwise). Why not 14 or 16? I don't know, maybe Saturn's 12 is a magic number. They're not using guard digits because they believe that the rest of the people who work with these things are wrong and blah blah blah.

I fully agree with you. I passed my Numerical Methods and got to grips with Mathematica 2.2 in the middle '90s with a 26 MFLOPS Pentium 90 with 8+32MB of RAM (an awfully expensive HP Vectra BTW). Even though apparently this ARM is from 2004, it still claims 215 MFLOPS (pinch of salt there.) But alas, management, resources allocation, fans... This is just some company's product after all, not an unquestionable encapsulation of mathematical wisdom, it really "really" doesn't matter too much.

(edit)

And it gets even more funny! Look at this fine piece of misleading calculator hype, now from the other side:
Solution 10702: Unexpected Results When Sin(Pi) Does Not Return Zero on the TI-68. Sounds familiar... Well, they changed their mind later and at least they're consistent now. Any company can sell you what you're willing to buy.