| Floating-point formats |
|---|
| IEEE 754 |
|
| Other |
| Alternatives |
| Tapered floating point |
| Computer architecture bit widths |
|---|
| Bit |
| Application |
| Binary floating-point precision |
| Decimal floating-point precision |
In computing, minifloats are floating-point values represented with very few bits. This reduced precision makes them ill-suited for general-purpose numerical calculations, but they are useful for special purposes such as:
- Computer graphics, where human perception of color and light levels has low precision.[1] The 16-bit half-precision format is very popular.
- Machine learning, which can be relatively insensitive to numeric precision. 16-bit, 8-bit, and even 4-bit floats are increasingly being used.[2]
Additionally, they are frequently encountered as a pedagogical tool in computer-science courses to demonstrate the properties and structures of floating-point arithmetic and IEEE 754 numbers.
Depending on context minifloat may mean any size less than 32, any size less or equal to 16, or any size less than 16. The term microfloat may mean any size less or equal to 8.[3]
- ^ Mocerino, Luca; Calimera, Andrea (24 November 2021). "AxP: A HW-SW Co-Design Pipeline for Energy-Efficient Approximated ConvNets via Associative Matching". Applied Sciences. 11 (23): 11164. doi:10.3390/app112311164.
- ^ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-arm-and-intel-publish-fp8-specification-for-standardization-as-an-interchange-format-for-ai/ (joint announcement by Intel, NVIDIA, Arm); https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.05433 (preprint paper jointly written by researchers from aforementioned 3 companies)
- ^ https://www.mrob.com/pub/math/floatformats.html#microfloat Microfloats
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