Of course nothing for free, but the point is to trade things you don't need for things you do. I also expect that chip area and power consumption for IEEE floa

Of course nothing for free, but the point is to trade things you don't need for things you do. I also expect that chip area and power consumption for IEEE floating point has been optimized quite a bit more than for this novel number format, so there may be some efficiency left on the table on those particular metrics.