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In 1946, Arthur Burks used the terms mantissa and characteristic to describe the two parts of a floating-point number (Burks [11] et al.) by analogy with the then-prevalent common logarithm tables: the characteristic is the integer part of the logarithm (i.e. the exponent), and the mantissa is the fractional part.
The speed of floating-point operations, commonly measured in terms of FLOPS, is an important characteristic of a computer system, especially for applications that involve intensive mathematical calculations. A floating-point unit (FPU, colloquially a math coprocessor) is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on ...
Mantissa (/ m æ n ˈ t ɪ s ə /) may refer to: Mantissa (logarithm), the fractional part of the common (base-10) logarithm; Significand (also commonly called mantissa), the significant digits of a floating-point number or a number in scientific notation; Mantissa (band) Mantissa, a 1982 novel by John Fowles; Mantissa College
The integer n is called the exponent and the real number m is called the significand or mantissa. [1] The term "mantissa" can be ambiguous where logarithms are involved, because it is also the traditional name of the fractional part of the common logarithm. If the number is negative then a minus sign precedes m, as in ordinary decimal notation.
In a normal floating-point value, there are no leading zeros in the significand (also commonly called mantissa); rather, leading zeros are removed by adjusting the exponent (for example, the number 0.0123 would be written as 1.23 × 10 −2). Conversely, a denormalized floating-point value has a significand with a leading digit of zero.
The part of the representation that contains the significant figures (1.30 or 1.23) is known as the significand or mantissa. The digits in the base and exponent ( 10 3 or 10 −2 ) are considered exact numbers so for these digits, significant figures are irrelevant.
ARM processors support (via a floating-point control register bit) an "alternative half-precision" format, which does away with the special case for an exponent value of 31 (11111 2). [10] It is almost identical to the IEEE format, but there is no encoding for infinity or NaNs; instead, an exponent of 31 encodes normalized numbers in the range ...
The IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic (IEEE 754) is a technical standard for floating-point arithmetic originally established in 1985 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The standard addressed many problems found in the diverse floating-point implementations that made them difficult to use reliably and ...