[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 ...

Floating-point arithmetic provides a practical means of representing real numbers on digital computers by encoding them in a finite number of bits for sign, exponent and significand. The IEEE-754 ...

An unfortunate reality of trying to represent continuous real numbers in a fixed space (e.g. with a limited number of bits) is that this comes with an inevitable loss of both precision and accuracy.

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Last month, I wrote about the hype ...

I am working on a viewshed* algorithm that does some floating point arithmetic. The algorithm sacrifices accuracy for speed and so only builds an approximate viewshed. The algorithm iteratively ...

Digital signal processors (DSPs) represent one of the fastest growing segments of the embedded world. Yet despite their ubiquity, DSPs present difficult challenges for programmers. In particular, ...

Most AI chips and hardware accelerators that power machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) applications include floating-point units (FPUs). Algorithms used in neural networks today are often ...

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 ...

Today’s digital signal processing applications such as radar, echo cancellation, and image processing are demanding more dynamic range and computation accuracy. Floating-point arithmetic units offer ...

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 – ...