In a comment following my post about half-precision arithmetic, "Raj C" asked how the parameters for IEEE Standard 754 floating point arithmetic were chosen. I replied that I didn't know but would try to find out. I called emeritus U. C. Berkeley Professor W. (Velvel) Kahan, who was the principle architect of 754. Here is what I learned.... read more >>

A year and a half ago I wrote a post about "half precision" 16-bit floating point arithmetic, Moler on fp16. I followed this with a bug fix, bug in fp16. Both posts were about fp16, defined in IEEE standard 754. This is only one of 15 possible 16-bit formats. In this post I am going to consider all 15.... read more >>