Self-quote:
> any imaginable application in the "classic" financial sector
Kranar:
> working in the financial sector (high frequency trading)
Okay, you got me there - you have pointed me to that single application from the financial sector where it is not totally acceptable to "waste" a few thousands of processor cycles to compute some money-related stuff. Granted, in HFT applications, these cycles may allow you to get your trades in front of those of the other HFT companies. You are forced to use CPU-accelerated (or maybe even GPU?) computations in this case, which automatically means "floating point".
But there's another difference that allows you do do this: you mostly don't have to care about exact, accurate-up-to-the-penny results. I assume most of your calculations are done to eventually arrive at a conclusion of whether to buy or sell some stock or not, and at which price. You have to take care of not accumulating too much rounding errors in the process, of course, but the threshold for these errors is set by yourself, and you can give yourself a bit of leeway on this, because it's all internal stuff, mostly probabilistic and statistics-based - the only stuff that may be audited by someone else and thus has to match the real numbers up to the last penny are the trades you do and the money you move around, and I bet all of this accounting-style stuff is recorded using...decimal numbers :D
I work in the retail industry (think cash registers, retail sale accounting, that kind of stuff) and pretty much any legislation on this planet would obliterate us if we'd tell them that the result of the computations of our systems may be some cents up or down from the real result - the one someone would get who just scribbled the numbers on a sheet of paper and added them up manually. Our customers have to pay taxes based on the sales that they account using our systems, and the tax calculations as well as the entire chain of processes they use to arrive at the final numbers are regularly audited by the respective governments. There are specific rules (of course differing by country) as to how many decimal places have to be used and how stuff has to be rounded in which particular cases in calculations that would require more decimals. We waste an enormous amount of CPU cycles just to strictly adhere to these rules - and that is not only absolutely necessary, but also totally okay, modern CPUs can easily accomodate this in our scenario.