Scribd
Upload
8 views

Ieee Arith

The IEEE Standard 754 specifies floating-point number formats and arithmetic operations. It defines binary floating-point numbers with four main formats - single (32 bits), double (64 bits), half (16 bits), and quadruple (128 bits) precision. The standard requires arithmetic operations be computed as if with infinite precision then rounded, and includes special values like NaN and infinity. It aims to provide a closed arithmetic system for numerical computation.

Uploaded by

Sofiane Bessai
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
8 views

Ieee Arith

The IEEE Standard 754 specifies floating-point number formats and arithmetic operations. It defines binary floating-point numbers with four main formats - single (32 bits), double (64 bits), half (16 bits), and quadruple (128 bits) precision. The standard requires arithmetic operations be computed as if with infinite precision then rounded, and includes special values like NaN and infinity. It aims to provide a closed arithmetic system for numerical computation.

Uploaded by

Sofiane Bessai
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 3

What Is IEEE Standard Arithmetic?

Nicholas J. Higham∗
May 7, 2020

The IEEE Standard 754, published in 1985 and revised in 2008 and 2019, is a standard
for binary and decimal floating-point arithmetic. The standard for decimal arithmetic
(IEEE Standard 854) was separate when it was first published in 1987, but it was included
with the binary standard from 2008. We focus here on the binary part of the standard.
The standard specifies floating-point number formats, the results of the basic floating-
point operations and comparisons, rounding modes, floating-point exceptions and their
handling, and conversion between different arithmetic formats.
A binary floating-point number is represented as
y = ±m × 2e−t ,
where t is the precision and e ∈ [emin , emax ] is the exponent. The significand m is an
integer satisfying m ≤ 2t − 1. Numbers with m ≥ 2t−1 are called normalized. Subnormal
numbers, for which 0 < m < 2t−1 and e = emin , are supported.
Four formats are defined, whose key parameters are summarized in the following table.
The second column shows the number of bits allocated to store the significand and the
exponent. I use the prefix “fp” instead of the prefix “binary” used in the standard. The
unit roundoff is u = 2−t .

Fp32 (single precision) and fp64 (double precision) were in the 1985 standard; fp16 (half
precision) and fp128 (quadruple precision) were introduced in 2008. Fp16 is defined only
as a storage format, though it is widely used for computation.
The size of these different number systems varies greatly. The next table shows the
number of normalized and subnormal numbers in each system.

∗
Department of Mathematics, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK
([email protected]).

1
We see that while one can easily carry out a computation on every fp16 number (to check
that the square root function is correctly computed, for example), it is impractical to do
so for every double precision number.
A key feature of the standard is that it is a closed system, thanks to the inclusion of
NaN (Not a Number) and ∞ (usually written as inf in programing languages) as floating-
point numbers: every arithmetic operation produces a number in the system. A NaN is
generated by operations such as
√
0/0, 0 × ∞, ∞/∞, (+∞) + (−∞), −1.

Arithmetic operations involving a NaN return a NaN as the answer. The number ∞
obeys the usual mathematical conventions regarding infinity, such as

∞ + ∞ = ∞, (−1) × ∞ = −∞, (finite)/∞ = 0.

This means, for example, that 1 + 1/x evaluates as 1 when x = ∞.


The standard specifies that all arithmetic operations (including square root) are to
be performed as if they were first calculated to infinite precision and then rounded to
the target format. A number is rounded to the next larger or next smaller floating-point
number according to one of four rounding modes:
• round to the nearest floating-point number, with rounding to even (rounding to the
number with a zero least significant bit) in the case of a tie;
• round towards plus infinity and round towards minus infinity (used in interval
arithmetic); and
• round towards zero (truncation, or chopping).
For round to nearest it follows that
√
fl(x op y) = (x op y)(1 + δ), |δ| ≤ u, op ∈ {+, −, ∗, /, },

where fl denotes the computed result. The standard also includes a fused multiply-add
operation (FMA), x ∗ y + z. The definition requires it to be computed with just one
rounding error, so that fl(x ∗ y + z) is the rounded version of x ∗ y + z, and hence satisfies

fl(x ∗ y + z) = (x ∗ y + z)(1 + δ), |δ| ≤ u.

FMAs are supported in some hardware and are usually executed at the same speed as a
single addition or multiplication.
The standard recommends the provision of correctly rounded exponentiation (xy ) and
transcendental functions (exp, log, sin, acos, etc.) and defines domains and special values
for them, but these functions are not required.
A new feature of the 2019 standard is augmented arithmetic operations, which compute
fl(x op y) along with the error x op y − fl(x op y), for op = +, −, ∗. These operations
are useful for implementing compensated summation and other special high accuracy
algorithms.
William (“Velvel”) Kahan of the University of California at Berkeley received the
1989 ACM Turing Award for his contributions to computer architecture and numerical
analysis, and in particular for his work on IEEE floating-point arithmetic standards 754
and 854.

2
References
This is a minimal set of references, which contain further useful references within.
• D. Goldberg, What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point
Arithmetic, ACM Computing Surveys 23, 5–48, 1991.
• Nicholas J. Higham, Accuracy and Stability of Numerical Algorithms, second edi-
tion, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 2002.
• IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic, IEEE Std 754-2019 (Revision of
IEEE 754-2008), The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, New York,
2019.
• Jean-Michel Muller, Nicolas Brunie, Florent de Dinechin, Claude-Pierre Jeannerod,
Mioara Joldes, Vincent Lefèvre, Guillaume Melquiond, Nathalie Revol, and Serge
Torres, Handbook of Floating-Point Arithmetic, second edition, Birkhäuser, Boston,
MA, 2018.

Related Blog Posts


• A Multiprecision World (2017)
• Book Review Revisited: Overton’s Numerical Computing with IEEE Floating Point
Arithmetic (2014)
• Floating Point Numbers by Cleve Moler (2014)
• Half Precision Arithmetic: fp16 Versus bfloat16 (2018)
• The Rise of Mixed Precision Arithmetic (2015)
• What Is Rounding? (2020)
• What Is Floating-Point Arithmetic? (2020)

This article is part of the “What Is” series, available from https://nhigham.com/
category/what-is and in PDF form from the GitHub repository https://github.com/
higham/what-is.

You might also like