2 ms·
That's one of the (many) problems with ieee floats: they "waste" as much bits for mantissa precision in the range of 10^0, 10^1, 10^2, etc, as they do in 10^300
by andrepd 2y ago
That's one of the (many) problems with ieee floats: they "waste" as much bits for mantissa precision in the range of 10^0, 10^1, 10^2, etc, as they do in 10^300 or 10^-300!
Proposals like Posits aim to improve on this :)
- nestorD 2y agoIn practice, Posits grabs very few additional bits and those are mostly felt in low bits (16 and less) regimes. That's a big reason it is mostly seeing adoption in memory constraint regimes. A great thing in the Posit proposal is that they also consider a distinct accumulator type for things like sums and dot product. In my experience (I did a PhD on measuring floating point error in large numerical simulations) those operations are the ones that are most likely to sneak on you and need fixing. But most people don't realize that those accumulator type are actually easy to use with IEEE floats, they are entirely orthogonal to using Posits.
- sfpotter 2y agoIEEE floats are an incredible feat of engineering. The people who designed them were geniuses. We should be appreciative of the fact that we have a consistent and portable way to do numerics. I'm glad we've got IEEE 754 and don't have to suffer through the pain of numerous competing standards.