floating point

noun

1. a decimal point whose location is not fixed, used especially in computer operations.

floating-point

1. Relating to a method of representing numerical quantities that uses two sets of integers, a mantissa and a characteristic, in which the value of the number is understood to be equal to the mantissa multiplied by a base (often 10) raised to the power of the characteristic. Scientific notation is one means of displaying floating-point numbers.

Example Sentences

"The calculations performed by spiking neural networks are much simpler than those in standard deep neural networks.," says Jesse Hagenaars, PhD candidate and one of the authors of the article, "Whereas digital spiking neurons only need to add integers, standard neurons have to multiply and add floating point numbers. This makes spiking neural networks quicker and more energy efficient. To understand why, think of how humans also find it much easier to calculate 5 + 8 than to calculate 6.25 x 3.45 + 4.05 x 3.45."

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At a supercomputing conference in Germany on Monday, Intel said its forthcoming "Falcon Shores" chip will have 288 gigabytes of memory and support 8-bit floating point computation.

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Nvidia says an H100 GPU is three times faster than its previous-generation A100 at FP16, FP32, and FP64 compute, and six times faster at 8-bit floating point math.

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The effect is of a floating point of view that narrows and widens, both deeply rendered and impossible to pin down.

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“We’ll be much more heavily biased towards graphics and less towards double-precision floating point,” adds Huang.

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