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Floating-point
In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a ''significand'' (a Sign (mathematics), signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some Radix, base) multiplied by an integer power of that base. Numbers of this form are called floating-point numbers. For example, the number 2469/200 is a floating-point number in base ten with five digits: 2469/200 = 12.345 = \! \underbrace_\text \! \times \! \underbrace_\text\!\!\!\!\!\!\!\overbrace^ However, 7716/625 = 12.3456 is not a floating-point number in base ten with five digits—it needs six digits. The nearest floating-point number with only five digits is 12.346. And 1/3 = 0.3333… is not a floating-point number in base ten with any finite number of digits. In practice, most floating-point systems use Binary number, base two, though base ten (decimal floating point) is also common. Floating-point arithmetic operations, such as addition and division, approximate the correspond ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IEEE 754
The IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic (IEEE 754) is a technical standard for floating-point arithmetic originally established in 1985 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The standard #Design rationale, addressed many problems found in the diverse floating-point implementations that made them difficult to use reliably and Software portability, portably. Many hardware floating-point units use the IEEE 754 standard. The standard defines: * ''arithmetic formats:'' sets of Binary code, binary and decimal floating-point data, which consist of finite numbers (including signed zeros and subnormal numbers), infinity, infinities, and special "not a number" values (NaNs) * ''interchange formats:'' encodings (bit strings) that may be used to exchange floating-point data in an efficient and compact form * ''rounding rules:'' properties to be satisfied when rounding numbers during arithmetic and conversions * ''operations:'' arithmetic and other operatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orders Of Magnitude (numbers)
This list contains selected positive numbers in increasing order, including counts of things, dimensionless quantities and probabilities. Each number is given a name in the short scale, which is used in English-speaking countries, as well as a name in the long scale, which is used in some of the countries that do not have English as their national language. Smaller than (one googolth) * ''Physics:'' The probability of a human spontaneously teleporting due to quantum effects is approximately 10−4.5×1029. * ''Mathematics – random selections:'' Approximately is a rough first estimate of the probability that a typing "monkey", or an English-illiterate typing robot, when placed in front of a typewriter, will type out William Shakespeare's play ''Hamlet'' as its first set of inputs, on the precondition it typed the needed number of characters. However, demanding correct punctuation, capitalization, and spacing, the probability falls to around 10−360,783. * ''Comp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Floating-point Unit
A floating-point unit (FPU), numeric processing unit (NPU), colloquially math coprocessor, is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. Typical operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square root. Modern designs generally include a fused multiply-add instruction, which was found to be very common in real-world code. Some FPUs can also perform various transcendental functions such as exponential or trigonometric calculations, but the accuracy can be low, so some systems prefer to compute these functions in software. Floating-point operations were originally handled in software in early computers. Over time, manufacturers began to provide standardized floating-point libraries as part of their software collections. Some machines, those dedicated to scientific processing, would include specialized hardware to perform some of these tasks with much greater speed. The introduction of microcode in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fixed-point Arithmetic
In computing, fixed-point is a method of representing fractional (non-integer) numbers by storing a fixed number of digits of their fractional part. Dollar amounts, for example, are often stored with exactly two fractional digits, representing the cents (1/100 of dollar). More generally, the term may refer to representing fractional values as integer multiples of some fixed small unit, e.g. a fractional amount of hours as an integer multiple of ten-minute intervals. Fixed-point number representation is often contrasted to the more complicated and computationally demanding floating-point representation. In the fixed-point representation, the fraction is often expressed in the same number base as the integer part, but using negative powers of the base ''b''. The most common variants are decimal (base 10) and binary (base 2). The latter is commonly known also as binary scaling. Thus, if ''n'' fraction digits are stored, the value will always be an integer multiple of ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rounding
Rounding or rounding off is the process of adjusting a number to an approximate, more convenient value, often with a shorter or simpler representation. For example, replacing $ with $, the fraction 312/937 with 1/3, or the expression √2 with . Rounding is often done to obtain a value that is easier to report and communicate than the original. Rounding can also be important to avoid false precision, misleadingly precise reporting of a computed number, measurement, or estimate; for example, a quantity that was computed as but is known to be accuracy and precision, accurate only to within a few hundred units is usually better stated as "about ". On the other hand, rounding of exact numbers will introduce some round-off error in the reported result. Rounding is almost unavoidable when reporting many computations – especially when dividing two numbers in integer or fixed-point arithmetic; when computing mathematical functions such as square roots, logarithms, and sines; or whe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Decimal Floating Point
Decimal floating-point (DFP) arithmetic refers to both a representation and operations on Decimal data type, decimal floating-point numbers. Working directly with decimal (base-10) fractions can avoid the rounding errors that otherwise typically occur when converting between decimal fractions (common in human-entered data, such as measurements or financial information) and binary (base-2) fractions. The advantage of decimal floating-point representation over decimal Fixed-point arithmetic, fixed-point and Integer (computer science), integer representation is that it supports a much wider range of values. For example, while a fixed-point representation that allocates 8 decimal digits and 2 decimal places can represent the numbers 123456.78, 8765.43, 123.00, and so on, a floating-point representation with 8 decimal digits could also represent 1.2345678, 1234567.8, 0.000012345678, 12345678000000000, and so on. This wider range can dramatically slow the accumulation of rounding error ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coprocessor
A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating-point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, cryptography or I/O interfacing with peripheral devices. By offloading processor-intensive tasks from the main processor, coprocessors can accelerate system performance. Coprocessors allow a line of computers to be customized, so that customers who do not need the extra performance do not need to pay for it. Functionality Coprocessors vary in their degree of autonomy. Some (such as FPUs) rely on direct control via coprocessor instructions, embedded in the CPU's instruction stream. Others are independent processors in their own right, capable of working asynchronously; they are still not optimized for general-purpose code, or they are incapable of it due to a limited instruction set focused on accelerating specific tasks. It is common for these to b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
FLOPS
Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second. Floating-point arithmetic Floating-point arithmetic is needed for very large or very small real numbers, or computations that require a large dynamic range. Floating-point representation is similar to scientific notation, except computers use base two (with rare exceptions), rather than base ten. The encoding scheme stores the sign, the exponent (in base two for Cray and VAX, base two or ten for IEEE floating point formats, and base 16 for IBM Floating Point Architecture) and the significand (number after the radix point). While several similar formats are in use, the most common is ANSI/IEEE Std. 754-1985. This standard defines the format for 32-bit numbers called ''single precision'', a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Significand
The significand (also coefficient, sometimes argument, or more ambiguously mantissa, fraction, or characteristic) is the first (left) part of a number in scientific notation or related concepts in floating-point representation, consisting of its significant digits. For negative numbers, it does not include the initial minus sign. Depending on the interpretation of the exponent, the significand may represent an integer or a fractional number, which may cause the term "mantissa" to be misleading, since the ''mantissa'' of a logarithm is always its fractional part. Although the other names mentioned are common, ''significand'' is the word used by IEEE 754, an important technical standard for floating-point arithmetic. In mathematics, the term "argument" may also be ambiguous, since "the argument of a number" sometimes refers to the length of a circular arc from 1 to a number on the unit circle in the complex plane. Example The number 123.45 can be represented as a decimal floati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Real Number
In mathematics, a real number is a number that can be used to measure a continuous one- dimensional quantity such as a duration or temperature. Here, ''continuous'' means that pairs of values can have arbitrarily small differences. Every real number can be almost uniquely represented by an infinite decimal expansion. The real numbers are fundamental in calculus (and in many other branches of mathematics), in particular by their role in the classical definitions of limits, continuity and derivatives. The set of real numbers, sometimes called "the reals", is traditionally denoted by a bold , often using blackboard bold, . The adjective ''real'', used in the 17th century by René Descartes, distinguishes real numbers from imaginary numbers such as the square roots of . The real numbers include the rational numbers, such as the integer and the fraction . The rest of the real numbers are called irrational numbers. Some irrational numbers (as well as all the rationals) a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scientific Notation
Scientific notation is a way of expressing numbers that are too large or too small to be conveniently written in decimal form, since to do so would require writing out an inconveniently long string of digits. It may be referred to as scientific form or standard index form, or standard form in the United Kingdom. This base ten notation is commonly used by scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, in part because it can simplify certain arithmetic operations. On scientific calculators, it is usually known as "SCI" display mode. In scientific notation, nonzero numbers are written in the form or ''m'' times ten raised to the power of ''n'', where ''n'' is an integer, and the coefficient ''m'' is a nonzero real number (usually between 1 and 10 in absolute value, and nearly always written as a terminating decimal). The integer ''n'' is called the exponent and the real number ''m'' is called the '' significand'' or ''mantissa''. The term "mantissa" can be ambiguous where loga ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Integer Power
In mathematics, exponentiation, denoted , is an operation involving two numbers: the ''base'', , and the ''exponent'' or ''power'', . When is a positive integer, exponentiation corresponds to repeated multiplication of the base: that is, is the product of multiplying bases: b^n = \underbrace_.In particular, b^1=b. The exponent is usually shown as a superscript to the right of the base as or in computer code as b^n. This binary operation is often read as " to the power "; it may also be referred to as " raised to the th power", "the th power of ", or, most briefly, " to the ". The above definition of b^n immediately implies several properties, in particular the multiplication rule:There are three common notations for multiplication: x\times y is most commonly used for explicit numbers and at a very elementary level; xy is most common when variables are used; x\cdot y is used for emphasizing that one talks of multiplication or when omitting the multiplication sign would ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
