3 ms·
Floating point, while convenient does have substantial drawbacks in the implementations of circuits that we have today. Efficiency gains like this somewhat expo
by omgJustTest 5y ago
Floating point, while convenient does have substantial drawbacks in the implementations of circuits that we have today. Efficiency gains like this somewhat expose facets that are normally hidden. It will be interesting to see the transition to either analog NN or quantum computers, which inherently have better representations of continuous values.
Edit: Additionally the serial vs parallel processing paradigm shift is a main advantage of the switch too! Queued systems seem to have severe scheduling limitations, which the real-world does not always inherently have.
- svat 5y agoThe linked article is about integer division and has nothing to do with floating point, and in fact I can't see how this idea could be applied to floating-point arithmetic. Can it?
- wizzwizz4 5y agoNot directly, no. The underlying mathematics kind of can, but you'd need dedicated circuitry (or bit-hacking) for it because of the floating point parts, and it would fall over around subnormals.
- dahart 5y agoI’m not certain, but while reading I was feeling like there potentially is a relationship. It was reminding me of the algorithm where you can approximate a reciprocal square root using a single subtraction from a magic number constant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root