3 ms·

I was curious about float16, and TIL that the 2008 revision of the standard includes it as an interchange format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-2008_r

• tialaramex 2y ago
  Note that this type (which Rust will/ does in nightly call "f16" and a C-like language would probably name "half") is not the only popular 16-bit floating point type, as some people want to have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bfloat16_floating-point_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bfloat16_floating-point_format
  • adrian_b 2y ago
    The IEEE FP16 format is what is useful in graphics applications, e.g. for storing color values. The Google BF16 format is useful strictly only for machine learning/AI applications, because its low precision is insufficient for anything else. BF16 has very low precision, but an exponent range equal to FP32, which makes overflows and underflows less likely.