[Numpy-discussion] Does float16 exist?

[Charles R Harris]

Hi,

On Jan 7, 2008 1:00 PM, Darren Dale <darren.dale at cornell.edu> wrote:

> One of my collaborators would like to use 16bit float arrays. According to
> http://www.scipy.org/Tentative_NumPy_Tutorial, and references to float16
> in
> numpy.core.numerictypes, it appears that this should be possible, but the
> following doesnt work:
>
> a=arange(10, dtype='float16')
> TypeError: data type not understood
>
> Can anyone offer some advice?
>

Does he care about speed? I think some graphics cards might support float16,
but any normal implementation in C would reguire software floating point, a
new type, and you couldn't rely on the normal operators. It might be doable
in C++ with operator overloading and templates, but doing it in C would be a
real hassle.


> Thanks,
> Darren


Chuck
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