Not just the representation is much better than IEEE 754, which is awful (e.g. having negative zero and wasting lots of combinations on encoding NaN even though a single one would do).

And not just that, it seems they also standardized arithmetics? Which is a big deal because IEEE 754 is unusable in heterogeneous distributed systems as every hardware implementation does something different.

Yes, that's also an important selling point: sane and *consistent* rounding.