Were you able to view the referenced article?

Yes, but the only IBM (I think) processor that I have is a ppc64 on an old mac box - now running Debian Wheezy with gcc-4.6.3.
I think that pre-dates the hardware improvements that you're talking about. Certainly, the _Decimal64/128 operations on that box are generally slower than on my (newer) Intel (Windows) and AMD (Ubuntu) boxes.
My ppc64 processor does, however, utilise IBM's favoured "Densely Packed Decimal" format instead of Intel's/AMD's preferred "Binary Integer Decimal" format.
DPD format is really nice - I can encode/decode that fairly quickly using a hash lookup, whereas BID format necessitates that the value be calculated.
I assume that each of my processors has some special capacity to handle DFP operations, and that gcc is making use of that capability - but there's no guarantee that either of those assumptions is correct.

the idea of getting 34 digits of decimal accuracy when using Perl is down right 'sexy'

I agree, and Math::Decimal128 will give you that - but only for the basic arithmetic operations at the moment.
Perl will improve markedly when someone gets around to (optionally) providing DFP processing built into perl. (But I think the time for that is not yet quite right.)

You've actually now got me wishing I had a power8 box to play with.
Which OS should it run to best test/experience these IBM capabilities ? ... AIX ?
Is power8 bigendian ?

Cheers,
Rob

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