Big-Number Arithmetic
New algorithms and further optimized implementation have improved
Mathematica performance for computations involving numbers with
hundreds, thousands, or even millions of digits. This big-number
performance in Mathematica 5 is unchallenged among general
computation systems. It is comparable to the performance of
special-purpose libraries, in some cases outpacing them too. (Note
that most numerical systems cannot perform big-number computations at
all, but instead rely purely on machine precision--usually 16 digits.)
The graphic shows performance improvements from Mathematica
4.2 and Mathematica 5 for some example big-number computations.
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