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A class of arithmetic, commonly used in computers. Integer arithmetic deals only in whole numbers, e.g., 1, 2, 99, 4563. Any calculation that does not result in a nice whole number is truncated back to a nice whole number and the fractional part is thrown away, e.g., 9/4 = 2 and not 2.25 or two and a quarter. Typically, computers can perform integer arithmetic more quickly than they can any other form of arithmetic, so most programs do as much work as they can in integer. However, most computers have significant limits on the values they can manage in integer format. Besides the lack of fractions, many computers cannot handle integer values beyond the millions. Thus, integers can be used to count time or to keep track of all the pennies in your bank account. However, most scientific applications deal with large values or need to be more precise than just throwing away the fractions. These kind of applications then make use of floating point arithmetic. For the SPEC CPU benchmarks, applications are classified as "integer" if they spend less than 1% of their time performing floating point calculations (which covers most non-scientific applications, e.g., compilers, utilities, simulators, etc.

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