8 Feb
2018
8 Feb
'18
10:37 p.m.
Mark Dickinson wrote:
And base-16 floating-point is still used in current IBM hardware, but I don't know whether that's purely for historical/backwards-compatibility reasons, or because it's faster for the FPU.
Historically, base 16 was used to get a bigger exponent range for a given number of exponent bits. That was a bigger deal back when memory was very expensive. I doubt there's any advantage in it now. -- Greg