2 ms·
It's possible to act, in software, as any type of arbitrary length numeric value. It's much faster to do it in hardware thought.
by lloydatkinson 3y ago
It's possible to act, in software, as any type of arbitrary length numeric value. It's much faster to do it in hardware thought.
- tomtom1337 3y agoOh, I should have clarified - could one start with a bfloat16 on software-side, convert to float16 (so that e.g a 3.4E38 float16 becomes a 65504 float16), then do any "heavy math" in fast hardware float16 instructions, and then convert back at the end?
- warpspin 3y agoNo, you can't. The exponent in a float16 is too small. You'd rather convert back to a 32-bit float, do your operations, and then throw away the surplus precision and convert back to bfloat16.