On February 25, 1991, during the eve of the of an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia, a Scud missile fired from Iraqi positions hit a US Army barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. A defense was available – ...

The traditional view is that the floating-point number format is superior to the fixed-point number format when it comes to representing sound digitally. In fact, while it may be counter-intuitive, ...

Floating-point values contain three fields: a sign bit, exponent bits, and significand or mantissa bits. The IEEE-754 floating-point number format defined a common floating-point format that most ...

[Editor's note: For an intro to fixed-point math, see Fixed-Point DSP and Algorithm Implementation. For a comparison of fixed- and floating-point hardware, see Fixed vs. floating point: a surprisingly ...

A way to represent very large and very small numbers using the same quantity of numeric positions. Floating point also enables calculating a wide range of numbers very quickly. Although floating point ...

Microsoft's Visual Basic programming language has variable types for three different kinds of numbers: integer, floating-point and decimal. Integer variables range from a short 2-byte format to a long ...

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Australia Conference, John Gustafson from the National University of Singapore presents: Beating Floating Point at its own game – Posit Arithmetic. “Dr.

The term floating point is derived from the fact that there is no fixed number of digits before and after the decimal point; namely, the decimal point can float. There are also representations in ...

Although something that’s taken for granted these days, the ability to perform floating-point operations in hardware was, for the longest time, something reserved for people with big wallets. This ...