Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
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.
IEEE 754-1985 [1] is a historic industry standard for representing floating-point numbers in computers, officially adopted in 1985 and superseded in 2008 by IEEE 754-2008, and then again in 2019 by minor revision IEEE 754-2019. [2]
The graphic demonstrates the addition of even smaller (1.3.2.3)-minifloats with 6 bits. This floating-point system follows the rules of IEEE 754 exactly. NaN as operand produces always NaN results. Inf − Inf and (−Inf) + Inf results in NaN too (green area). Inf can be augmented and decremented by finite values without change.
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 ...
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 operations other than ordered comparisons normally propagate a quiet NaN (qNaN). Most floating-point operations on a signaling NaN ( sNaN ) signal the invalid-operation exception ; the default exception action is then the same as for qNaN operands and they produce a qNaN if producing a floating-point result.
In floating-point arithmetic, the Sterbenz lemma or Sterbenz's lemma [1] is a theorem giving conditions under which floating-point differences are computed exactly. It is named after Pat H. Sterbenz, who published a variant of it in 1974.