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A comment on Intel Prepares to Graft Google’s Bfloat16 onto Processors. Parent comment

Re:Intel Prepares to Graft Google’s Bfloat16 onto Processors by somethingnot on Saturday July 20, 2019 @07:32PM (#20488955)
bfloat16 sounds like it could be supported with minimal changes to existing floating point units, maybe with just some improved microcode.

FB's approach on the other side requires entirely redesigned and separate execution units. That's harder to justify, that silicon will remain dark for non-DL usage.

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Re:Intel Prepares to Graft Google’s Bfloat16 onto Processors by mjevans on Sunday July 21, 2019 @03:02AM (#20490283)
It looks like a standard 32 bit float but with the mantissa truncated to fit in to 16 bits of storage.

I imagine it still keeps most of the performance benefits since it's eliminating around 2/3rds of the longest binary component.

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