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As many people have noticed the same code executed in Emulator mode gives different floating point results from the kernels run in Debug or Release mode.

Although I know what causes this I have never bothered to investigate the actual differences as most of the stuff I write runs entirely on the GPU. Recently I have had to compare results on the CPU<->GPU and wrote some code to change the FPU settings. Firstly a quick explanation:

By default the CPU (FPU) is set to use 80 bit floating point internally. This means that when you load in an integer (fild) or a single / double float (fld) it gets converted to a 80 bit number inside the FPU stack. All operations are performed internally at 80 bits and when storing the result it converts back to the correct floating point width (single / double)  (fst / fstp). 

This method of operation is desirable as it reduces the effect of rounding / truncating on the intermediate results.  Of course while very useful for computing on the CPU this is not how the CUDA devices operate.

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