[Editor's note: For an intro to fixed-point math, see Fixed-Point DSP and Algorithm Implementation. For a comparison of fixed- and floating-point hardware, see Fixed vs. floating point: a surprisingly ...

Floating-point arithmetic provides a practical means of representing real numbers on digital computers by encoding them in a finite number of bits for sign, exponent and significand. The IEEE-754 ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Last month, I wrote about the hype ...

Although it’s tempting to think that computers can do anything, they are not without their limitations. For example, computers’ limited memory makes them unable to compute real numbers. So, when a ...

In 1985, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) established IEEE 754, a standard for floating point formats and arithmetic that would become the model for practically all FP ...

Embedded C and C++ programmers are familiar with signed and unsigned integers and floating-point values of various sizes, but a number of numerical formats can be used in embedded applications. Here ...