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Stanford Seminar: Beyond Floating Point: Next Generation Computer Arithmetic

Stanford Online · lecture · Watch on YouTube

Computer architecture & CPUsPure mathematicsMachine learning & deep learning

What it is

John Gustafson presents posits, a proposed drop-in replacement for IEEE 754 floats that is simpler in hardware and more flexible in precision. The seminar includes a live demo and machine learning results.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Cited in floating-point threads as the main introduction to posits and unums as an alternative to IEEE floats.

  • 5 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2017, last 2021

What HN commenters said

  1. “Suggested as relevant talk on next-generation arithmetic.”

    espeed, 2017-02 · Recommendation · in “Why does e to pi i equal -1? (2015) [video]”

  2. “Check out the talk”

    Gustafson's talk on posits, practical for hardware.

    trsohmers, 2017-02 · Recommendation · in “The “high-level CPU” challenge (2008)”

  3. “I'm very surprised nobody has brought up John Gustafson's Unum work.”

    Gustafson presents posits; relevant to floating point surprises.

    vanderZwan, 2017-02 · Recommendation · in “GCC optimized code gives strange floating point results”

  4. “You may like”

    Posits faster than IEEE in hardware; commenter appears in video.

    dnautics, 2017-09 · Recommendation · in “Floating Point Visually Explained”

  5. “Here's a nice introductory presentation”

    Nice introductory presentation on unums and posits.

    gbrown_, 2018-06 · Recommendation · in “Floating-Point Determinism (2013)”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: posits, unum, floating point, ieee 754, numerical computing

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