Quadruple-precision floating-point format special characteristics: In addition to the double-double arithmetic, it is also possible to generate triple-double or quad-double arithmetic if higher precision is required without any higher precision floating-point library. They are represented as a sum of three (or four) double-precision values respectively. They can represent operations with at least 159/161 and 212/215 bits respectively. A similar technique can be used to produce a double-quad arithmetic, which is represented as a sum of two quadruple-precision values. They can represent operations with at least 226 (or 227) bits. Quadruple precision is often implemented in software by a variety of techniques (such as
Quadruple-precision floating-point format switch) or simply as being synonymous with double precision (e.g. Microsoft Visual C++), rather than as quadruple precision. On a few other architectures, some C/C++ compilers implement codice_8 as quadruple precision, e.g. gcc on PowerPC (as double-double) and SPARC, or the Sun Studio compilers on SPARC. Even if codice_8 is not quadruple precision, however, some C/C++ compilers provide a nonstandard quadruple-precision type as an extension. For example, gcc provides a quadruple-precision type called codice_14 for x86, x86-64 and Itanium CPUs, and on PowerPC as IEEE 128-bit floating-point using the -mfloat128-hardware or -mfloat128 options; and some versions of Intel's C/C++ compiler