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A floating-point unit (FPU), numeric processing unit (NPU), [1] colloquially math coprocessor, is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. [2] Typical operations are addition , subtraction , multiplication , division , and square root .
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.
A floating point unit is a part of a computer system that performs mathematics on floating point numbers. In the past they were separate integrated circuits, but since the 1990s they have been a standard part of most general-purpose central processing units.
A floating-point variable can represent a wider range of numbers than a fixed-point variable of the same bit width at the cost of precision. A signed 32-bit integer variable has a maximum value of 2 31 − 1 = 2,147,483,647, whereas an IEEE 754 32-bit base-2 floating-point variable has a maximum value of (2 − 2 −23) × 2 127 ≈ 3.4028235 ...
Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. [1] For such cases, it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second. [citation needed]
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.
Swift introduced half-precision floating point numbers in Swift 5.3 with the Float16 type. [20] OpenCL also supports half-precision floating point numbers with the half datatype on IEEE 754-2008 half-precision storage format. [21] As of 2024, Rust is currently working on adding a new f16 type for IEEE half-precision 16-bit floats. [22]
Floating-point unit, a computer component that handles mathematical operations on floating-point numbers; Floor pick-up, a power supply scheme for bumper cars; Progress Party's Youth (Norwegian: Fremskrittspartiets Ungdom, FpU