3 ms·
There are a whole bunch of people who insist that lots of the "baggage" of IEEE 754 is really important and must not be abandoned. For most applications it is j
by phkahler 4y ago
There are a whole bunch of people who insist that lots of the "baggage" of IEEE 754 is really important and must not be abandoned. For most applications it is just extra garbage and for the few there are other ways to do what they want.
- NohatCoder 4y agoThat may be true, but you don't need a fundamentally different number representation in order to throw away most of it. Also, the die size cost is quite small. The biggest saving you could make is probably foregoing exactly rounded results, and only stipulate that the result has to be within ±1 lsb of the true value. That would save multipliers from computing a bunch of bits that don't end up in the result anyway, except for the rare case where they decide the rounding. That would probably be a good trade-off for most AI chips. For general purpose CPUs I don't think it is worth the breakage.
- noobermin 4y agoWe literally had a post about "old not being broken" on the front page yesterday with a significant discussion on developer churn and now people are already clamoring on other pages to deprecate floating points. Let's have a little memory to shake us out of our habits, shall we?