Hexadecimal floating point

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Hexadecimal floating point may refer to:

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In computing and electronic systems, binary-coded decimal (BCD) is a class of binary encodings of decimal numbers where each digit is represented by a fixed number of bits, usually four or eight. Sometimes, special bit patterns are used for a sign or other indications.

Fortran General-purpose programming language

Fortran is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.

Floating-point arithmetic Computer format for representing real numbers

In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic using formulaic representation of real numbers as an approximation to support a trade-off between range and precision. For this reason, floating-point computation is often found in systems which include very small and very large real numbers, which require fast processing times. A number is, in general, represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent in some fixed base; the base for the scaling is normally two, ten, or sixteen. A number that can be represented exactly is of the following form:

In mathematics and computing, the hexadecimal numeral system is a positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of 16. Unlike the common way of representing numbers using 10 symbols, hexadecimal uses 16 distinct symbols, most often the symbols "0"–"9" to represent values 0 to 9, and "A"–"F" to represent values 10 to 15.

Floating-point unit

A floating-point unit 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. Some FPUs can also perform various transcendental functions such as exponential or trigonometric calculations, but the accuracy can be very low, so that some systems prefer to compute these functions in software.

Scientific notation is a way of expressing numbers that are too large or too small to be conveniently written in decimal form. It may be referred to as scientific form or standard index form, or standard form in the UK. 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.

A quaternary numeral system is base-4. It uses the digits 0, 1, 2 and 3 to represent any real number.

The IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic is a technical standard for floating-point arithmetic established in 1985 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The standard addressed many problems found in the diverse floating-point implementations that made them difficult to use reliably and portably. Many hardware floating-point units use the IEEE 754 standard.

Hexadecimal floating point is a format for encoding floating-point numbers first introduced on the IBM System/360 computers, and supported on subsequent machines based on that architecture, as well as machines which were intended to be application-compatible with System/360.

Scientific Data Systems (SDS), was an American computer company founded in September 1961 by Max Palevsky and Robert Beck, veterans of Packard Bell Corporation and Bendix, along with eleven other computer scientists. SDS was an early adopter of integrated circuits in computer design and the first to employ silicon transistors. The company concentrated on larger scientific workload focused machines and sold many machines to NASA during the Space Race. Most machines were both fast and relatively low priced. The company was sold to Xerox in 1969, but dwindling sales due to the oil crisis of 1973–74 caused Xerox to close the division in 1975 at a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. During the Xerox years the company was officially Xerox Data Systems (XDS), whose machines were the Xerox 500 series.

In computer architecture, 24-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 24 bits wide. Also, 24-bit CPU and ALU architectures are those that are based on registers, address buses, or data buses of that size.

SDS 930 Commercial 24-bit computer using bipolar junction transistors sold in the 1960s

The SDS 930 is a commercial 24-bit computer using bipolar junction transistors sold by Scientific Data Systems. It was announced in December 1963, with first installations in June 1964.

Decimal floating-point (DFP) arithmetic refers to both a representation and operations on 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 and binary (base-2) fractions.

Decimal computer

Decimal computers are computers which can represent numbers and addresses in decimal as well as providing instructions to operate on those numbers and addresses directly in decimal, without conversion to a pure binary representation. Some also had a variable wordlength, which enabled operations on numbers with a large number of digits.

SDS Sigma series

The SDS Sigma series is a series of third generation computers that were introduced by Scientific Data Systems of the United States in 1966. The first machines in the series are the 16-bit Sigma 2 and the 32-bit Sigma 7; the Sigma 7 was the first 32-bit computer released by SDS. At the time the only competition for the Sigma 7 was the IBM 360.

In computing and telecommunications, a unit of information is the capacity of some standard data storage system or communication channel, used to measure the capacities of other systems and channels. In information theory, units of information are also used to measure the entropy of random variables and information contained in messages.

Offset binary, also referred to as excess-K, excess-N, excess-e, excess code or biased representation, is a digital coding scheme where all-zero corresponds to the minimal negative value and all-one to the maximal positive value. There is no standard for offset binary, but most often the offset K for an n-bit binary word is K = 2n−1. This has the consequence that the "zero" value is represented by a 1 in the most significant bit and zero in all other bits, and in general the effect is conveniently the same as using two's complement except that the most significant bit is inverted. It also has the consequence that in a logical comparison operation, one gets the same result as with a true form numerical comparison operation, whereas, in two's complement notation a logical comparison will agree with true form numerical comparison operation if and only if the numbers being compared have the same sign. Otherwise the sense of the comparison will be inverted, with all negative values being taken as being larger than all positive values.

The Xerox 500 series was a line of computers from Xerox Data Systems (XDS) introduced in the early 1970s as backward-compatible upgrades for the Sigma series machines.

SDS 9 Series

The SDS 9 Series computers are a backward compatible line of transistorized computers produced by Scientific Data Systems in the 1960s and 1970s. This line includes the SDS 910, SDS 920, SDS 925, SDS 930, SDS 940, and the SDS 945. The SDS 9300 is an extension of the 9xx architecture. The 1965 SDS 92 is an incompatible 12-bit system built using monolithic integrated circuits.

In computing, tapered floating point (TFP) is a format similar to floating point, but with variable-sized entries for the significand and exponent instead of the fixed-length entries found in normal floating-point formats. In addition to this, tapered floating-point formats provide a fixed-size pointer entry indicating the number of digits in the exponent entry. The number of digits of the significand entry results from the difference of the fixed total length minus the length of the exponent and pointer entries.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Beebe, Nelson H. F. (2017-08-22). "Chapter H. Historical floating-point architectures". The Mathematical-Function Computation Handbook - Programming Using the MathCW Portable Software Library (1 ed.). Salt Lake City, UT, USA: Springer International Publishing AG. p. 948. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-64110-2. ISBN   978-3-319-64109-6. LCCN   2017947446.
  2. 1 2 Zehendner, Eberhard (Summer 2008). "Rechnerarithmetik: Fest- und Gleitkommasysteme" (PDF) (Lecture script) (in German). Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. p. 2. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2018-08-07. Retrieved 2018-08-07.