some hardware also provides extended precision formats that provide higher precision and/or a larger exponent range. on such architectures it may be more efficient to compute intermediate results using such extended formats. this may avoid round-off errors, overflows and underflows that would otherwise occur, but can cause programs to produce different output on such architectures. it was particularly expensive to avoid the use of extended precision on x86 machines with the traditional x87 floating-point architecture. although it was easy to control calculation precision, limiting the exponent range for intermediate results required additional costly instructions.