3 ms·
Why did they fix the bit-width for the mantissa and exponent? It would be nice to have more bits for the mantissa when you are near 1, and then ignore the manti
by javajosh 9y ago
Why did they fix the bit-width for the mantissa and exponent? It would be nice to have more bits for the mantissa when you are near 1, and then ignore the mantissa entirely when you're dealing with enormous exponents, and very far from one. Granted, there would be some overhead (e.g. a 3-bit field describing the exponent length, or something) but it would be a useful data-structure.
- coldtea 9y agoThat exists, it's called arbitrary precision floating point (as opposed to single/double precision etc).
- dnautics 9y agoYou may like: https://youtu.be/aP0Y1uAA-2Y https://youtu.be/aP0Y1uAA-2Y It turns out the math is slightly harder but it's faster than IEEE FP in hardware, probably because of less conditionals in the spec. There is better performance in terms of numerical accuracy at the cost of substantially more difficult error analysis. Disclaimer: I'm in the video.