IBM Floating Point Architecture

IBM Floating Point Architecture

IBM System/360 computers, and subsequent machines based on that architecture (mainframes), support a hexadecimal floating-point format.

In comparison to IEEE 754 floating-point, the IBM floating-point format has a longer significand, and a shorter exponent. All IBM floating-point formats have 7 bits of exponent with a bias of 64. The normalized range of representable numbers are from 16-65 to 1663 (approx. 5.39761 × 10-79 to 7.237005 × 1075).

The number is represented as the following formula: (-1)sign × 0.significand × 16exponent-64

Read more about IBM Floating Point Architecture:  Single-precision 32-bit, Double-precision 64-bit, Extended-precision 128-bit, Arithmetic Operations, IEEE 754 On IBM Mainframes, Special Uses, Systems Which Use Base-16 Excess-64 Floating-Point Format

Famous quotes containing the words floating, point and/or architecture:

    “The man who, from the beginning of his life, has been bathed at length in the soft atmosphere of a woman, in the smell of her hands, of her bosom, of her knees, of her hair, of her supple and floating clothes, ... has contracted from this contact a tender skin and a distinct accent, a kind of androgyny without which the harshest and most masculine genius remains, as far as perfection in art is concerned, an incomplete being.”
    —Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)

    “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”
    —Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

    “The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.”
    —Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)