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Stanford Seminar: Beyond Floating Point: Next Generation Computer Arithmetic

Stanford Online · 32.8K views · 2017-02-03 · 1:31:28

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Overview

John Gustafson presents posits, a proposed drop-in replacement for IEEE 754 floats that is simpler in hardware and more flexible in precision. The seminar includes a live demo and machine learning results.

On Hacker News

Cited in floating-point threads as the main introduction to posits and unums as an alternative to IEEE floats.

Recommended by 5 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2017–2021

Topics

Computer architecture & CPUsPure mathematicsMachine learning & deep learning
Search by tags
positsunumfloating pointieee 754numerical computing

What people said

gbrown_ · 2018-06 · Recommendation

For anyone interested in this sort of thing you'd probably also be interested in John Gustafson's work on unums/posits. Here's a nice introductory presentation [VIDEO]

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dnautics · 2017-09 · Recommendation

You may like: [VIDEO] It turns out the math is slightly harder but it's faster than IEEE FP in hardware, probably because of less conditionals in the spec. There is better performance in terms of numerical accuracy at the cost of substantially more difficult error analysis. Disclaimer: I'm in the video.

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espeed · 2017-02 · Recommendation

Have you seen "Stanford Seminar: Beyond Floating Point: Next Generation Computer Arithmetic"? [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Stanford Online, played through YouTube.

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