It’s definitely conceptually simpler, but both conversions are a single fully-pipelined operation on any CPU made in the past 5 years, and can be folded into th

It’s definitely conceptually simpler, but both conversions are a single fully-pipelined operation on any CPU made in the past 5 years, and can be folded into the arithmetic operation on custom HW. In practice the cost of conversion isn’t really an issue; the win with bfloat16 is the added dynamic range.