Chihong,
I notice that IEEE-754-2008 does in fact define a
16-bit floating point standard now,
does your processor conform to that standard, if so there should be
no objection to adding fp16 to LLVM
and you should have no problem using it, at least that's what I think
Chris is trying to say (?).
IEEE-754-2008 fp16: 1-bit sign, 5-bit exponent, 10-bit
fraction
largest ~~ 2^16 (65504), smallest ~~ 2^-14 (0.000,061).
uses the same exponent interpretation as other formats
0 --> +/-zero or denorm, MAX --> +/-infinity or not-a-number,
and (I presume) expects IEEE round-to-nearest-even to be the default
rounding mode,
-Peter Lawrence.
On Mar 22, 2011, at 1:23 PM, llvmdev-request at cs.uiuc.edu wrote:
> On Mar 21, 2011, at 1:59 PM, Zhang, Chihong wrote:
>
>> Hi Chris,
>>
>> It is important for embedded/mobile computation to have efficient
>> fp16 support, otherwise those users will suffer from the merging
>> problem with their local LLVM with native fp16 type they add
>> (locally). So we should either add full fp16 support as a basic
>> floating point type or enhance the LLVM infrastructure to make
>> floating point type as scalable as int type.
>
> As I've said several times now :), I'm ok with having fp16 as a
> native LLVM type so long as there is hardware that implements fp16
> arithmetic operations like add and sub with correct fp16 rounding etc.
>
> -Chris
>
>>
>>
>> -Chihong
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