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Double-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP64 or float64) is a floating-point number format, usually occupying 64 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. Double precision may be chosen when the range or precision of single precision would be insufficient.
Additionally, they are frequently encountered as a pedagogical tool in computer-science courses to demonstrate the properties and structures of floating-point arithmetic and IEEE 754 numbers. Minifloats with 16 bits are half-precision numbers (opposed to single and double precision). There are also minifloats with 8 bits or even fewer. [2]
As an 8-bit exponent was not wide enough for some operations desired for double-precision numbers, e.g. to store the product of two 32-bit numbers, [20] both Kahan's proposal and a counter-proposal by DEC therefore used 11 bits, like the time-tested 60-bit floating-point format of the CDC 6600 from 1965.
A property of the single- and double-precision formats is that their encoding allows one to easily sort them without using floating-point hardware, as if the bits represented sign-magnitude integers, although it is unclear whether this was a design consideration (it seems noteworthy that the earlier IBM hexadecimal floating-point representation ...
On a typical computer system, a double-precision (64-bit) binary floating-point number has a coefficient of 53 bits (including 1 implied bit), an exponent of 11 bits, and 1 sign bit. Since 2 10 = 1024, the complete range of the positive normal floating-point numbers in this format is from 2 −1022 ≈ 2 × 10 −308 to approximately 2 1024 ≈ ...
This alternative definition is significantly more widespread: machine epsilon is the difference between 1 and the next larger floating point number.This definition is used in language constants in Ada, C, C++, Fortran, MATLAB, Mathematica, Octave, Pascal, Python and Rust etc., and defined in textbooks like «Numerical Recipes» by Press et al.
Such floating-point numbers are known as "reals" or "floats" in general, but with a number of variations: A 32-bit float value is sometimes called a "real32" or a "single", meaning "single-precision floating-point value". A 64-bit float is sometimes called a "real64" or a "double", meaning "double-precision floating-point value".
In computing, octuple precision is a binary floating-point-based computer number format that occupies 32 bytes (256 bits) in computer memory. This 256- bit octuple precision is for applications requiring results in higher than quadruple precision .