3 ms·
The proposed format has changed several times since 2015, so not all those threads are discussing the same thing as this one. Posits are Type III Unums IIRC, t
by rrss 7y ago
The proposed format has changed several times since 2015, so not all those threads are discussing the same thing as this one.
Posits are Type III Unums IIRC, the original proposal was with Type I Unums.
Previous proposals were variable length formats, which is pretty much a nonstarter for a variety of reasons. This proposal (posits) is a fixed length format with variable length fields.
- xenadu02 7y agoThere have been several papers and blog posts written about the more recent posits proposals. https://marc-b-reynolds.github.io/math/2019/02/06/Posit1.html https://marc-b-reynolds.github.io/math/2019/02/06/Posit1.htm... https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01959581v2 https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01959581v2 https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02131982 https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02131982 The bottom line is they are a tradeoff; they certainly aren't purely better than IEEE floats. Plus they seem to have a non-trivial hardware cost (one of the linked papers shows the adder is twice as large as the equivalent IEEE adder and has double the latency!)