I feel like your description comes across as more negative on the design of IEEE-754 floats than you intend. Is there something else you think would have been better? Maybe I’m misreading it.
Maybe the hardware focus can be blamed for the large exponents and small mantissas.
The reasonable only non-IEEE things that comes to mind for me are:
- bfloat16 which just works with the most significant half of a float32.
- log8 which is almost all exponent.
I guess in both cases they are about getting more out of available memory bandwidth and the main operation is f32 + x * y -> f32 (ie multiply and accumulate into f32 result).
Maybe they will be (or already are) incorporated into IEEE standards though
Well, I do know some people who really hate subnormals because they are really slow on Intel and kinda slow on Arm. Subnormals I can see being a pain for graphics HW designers. I for one neither love nor hate IEEE 754, other than -0. I have spent far, far too many hours dealing with it. IMHO, it's an encoding artifact masquerading as a feature.
Maybe the hardware focus can be blamed for the large exponents and small mantissas.
The reasonable only non-IEEE things that comes to mind for me are:
- bfloat16 which just works with the most significant half of a float32.
- log8 which is almost all exponent.
I guess in both cases they are about getting more out of available memory bandwidth and the main operation is f32 + x * y -> f32 (ie multiply and accumulate into f32 result).
Maybe they will be (or already are) incorporated into IEEE standards though