Thanks for your reply, this is an interesting perspective - based on your comment, it seems likely that you have more real-world experience with these issues th

Thanks for your reply, this is an interesting perspective - based on your comment, it seems likely that you have more real-world experience with these issues than I do. Regarding floating point performing this tradeoff for you: yes, I understand that floating point arithmetic trades simplicity for greater dynamic range, giving lots of precision to small values and less precision to large values. You can tackle some of these issues with fixed point arithmetic at the cost of increased memory usage. For example, instead of using a 32 bit float, you could use a 64 bit fixed point value, where the most significant 32 bits represent the integral part and the least significant 32 bits represent the fractional part. Obviously this type offers both much greater range and greater precision (at every scale) than the 32 bit float, at the cost of 2x memory usage. I suspect that the 64 bit fixed point type might still be faster to work with in hardware, due to the relative simplicity of implementing fixed point arithmetic in hardware. What do you think?