this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2026
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I feel obligated to post a link to this excellent (albeit incomplete) writeup of posits and unums, which can more accurately represent common fractions in memory at the same (or lower) bit size compared to traditional floating point.
Said page also includes the single best slightly-above-entry-level explanation of how floating point works I've ever seen.
Isn't a big point of floating point that it can easily have mathematical operators done on them on CPUs? Sure, complex circuitry is no big deal these days, but IIRC, there were very good reasons for what was chosen.
One of the linked papers makes the claim that the circuitry would be less complex than that needed for floats, but also includes this note:
The proposed system also lacks NaN and separate positive/negative infinities, so it wouldn't be a drop-in replacement.