A single polynomial approximation for tan(x) works in infinite precision
up to |x| < pi/2, but in finite precision, to restrict the accumulated
roundoff error to < 1 ulp, |x| must be restricted to less than about
sqrt(0.5/((1.5+1.5)/3)) ~= 0.707. We restricted it a bit more to
give a safety margin including some slop for optimizations. Now that
we use double precision for the calculations, the accumulated roundoff
error is in double-precision ulps so it can easily be made almost 2**29
times smaller than a single-precision ulp. Near x = pi/4 its maximum
is about 0.5+(1.5+1.5)*x**2/3 ~= 1.117 double-precision ulps.
The minimax polynomial needs to be different to work for the larger
interval. I didn't increase its degree the old degree is just large
enough to keep the final error less than 1 ulp and increasing the
degree would be a pessimization. The maximum error is now ~0.80
ulps instead of ~0.53 ulps.
The speedup from this optimization for uniformly distributed args in
[-2pi, 2pi] is 28-43% on athlons, depending on how badly gcc selected
and scheduled the instructions in the old version. The old version
has some int-to-float conversions that are apparently difficult to schedule
well, but gcc-3.3 somehow did everything ~10 cycles or ~10% faster than
gcc-3.4, with the difference especially large on AXPs. On A64s, the
problem seems to be related to documented penalties for moving single
precision data to undead xmm registers. With this version, the speed
is cycles is almost independent of the athlon and gcc version despite
the large differences in instruction selection to use the FPU on AXPs
and SSE on A64s.
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