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Single-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP32 or float32) is a computer number format, usually occupying 32 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. A floating-point variable can represent a wider range of numbers than a fixed-point variable of the same bit ...
A floating-point system can be used to represent, with a fixed number of digits, numbers of very different orders of magnitude — such as the number of meters between galaxies or between protons in an atom. For this reason, floating-point arithmetic is often used to allow very small and very large real numbers that require fast processing times.
For the binary interchange formats whose encoding follows the IEEE 754-2008 recommendation on placement of the NaN signaling bit, the comparison is identical to one that type puns the floating-point numbers to a sign–magnitude integer (assuming a payload ordering consistent with this comparison), an old trick for FP comparison without an FPU.
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.
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 ...
This was subsequently addressed in IEEE 754-2008, which standardized the encoding of decimal floating-point data, albeit with two different alternative methods. IBM POWER6 and newer POWER processors include DFP in hardware, as does the IBM System z9 [5] (and later zSeries machines). SilMinds offers SilAx, a configurable vector DFP coprocessor. [6]
The encoding scheme stores the sign, the exponent (in base two for Cray and VAX, base two or ten for IEEE floating point formats, and base 16 for IBM Floating Point Architecture) and the significand (number after the radix point). While several similar formats are in use, the most common is ANSI/IEEE Std. 754-1985.
2 Encoding of special values. ... The bfloat16 (brain floating point) [1] [2] floating-point format is a computer number format occupying 16 bits in computer memory; ...