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Most decimal fractions (or most fractions in general) cannot be represented exactly as a fraction with a denominator that is a power of two. For example, the simple decimal fraction 0.3 (3 ⁄ 10) might be represented as 5404319552844595 ⁄ 18014398509481984 (0.299999999999999988897769…). This inexactness causes many problems that are ...
[6] [2] [7] In some specialized contexts, the word decimal is instead used for this purpose (such as in International Civil Aviation Organization-regulated air traffic control communications). In mathematics, the decimal separator is a type of radix point, a term that also applies to number systems with bases other than ten.
Fixed-point formatting can be useful to represent fractions in binary. The number of bits needed for the precision and range desired must be chosen to store the fractional and integer parts of a number. For instance, using a 32-bit format, 16 bits may be used for the integer and 16 for the fraction.
Thus only 23 fraction bits of the significand appear in the memory format, but the total precision is 24 bits (equivalent to log 10 (2 24) ≈ 7.225 decimal digits) for normal values; subnormals have gracefully degrading precision down to 1 bit for the smallest non-zero value.
This decimal format can also represent any binary fraction a/2 m, such as 1/8 (0.125) or 17/32 (0.53125). More generally, a rational number a / b , with a and b relatively prime and b positive, can be exactly represented in binary fixed point only if b is a power of 2; and in decimal fixed point only if b has no prime factors other than 2 and/or 5.
Two to the power of n, written as 2 n, is the number of values in which the bits in a binary word of length n can be set, where each bit is either of two values. A word, interpreted as representing an integer in a range starting at zero, referred to as an "unsigned integer", can represent values from 0 (000...000 2) to 2 n − 1 (111...111 2) inclusively.
The bfloat16 (brain floating point) [1] [2] floating-point format is a computer number format occupying 16 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point.
The Q notation is a way to specify the parameters of a binary fixed point number format. For example, in Q notation, the number format denoted by Q8.8 means that the fixed point numbers in this format have 8 bits for the integer part and 8 bits for the fraction part. A number of other notations have been used for the same purpose.