[Haskell-cafe] 16 bit floating point data in Haskell?

[Richard O'Keefe]

On Sep 28, 2009, at 9:40 AM, Olex P wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Yes, I mean "sizeOf 2". It's useful not only on GPUs but also in  
> "normal" software. Think of huge data sets in computer graphics  
> (particle clouds, volumetric data, images etc.) Some data (normals,  
> density, temperature and so on) can be easily represented as float  
> 16 making files 200 GB instead of 300 GB. Good benefits.

 From the OpenEXR technical introduction:

	half numbers have 1 sign bit, 5 exponent bits,
	and 10 mantissa bits.  The interpretation of
	the sign, exponent and mantissa is analogous
	to IEEE-754 floating-point numbers.  half
	supports normalized and denormalized numbers,
	infinities and NANs (Not A Number).  The range
	of representable numbers is roughly 6.0E-8 to 6.5E4;
	numbers smaller than 6.1E-5 are denormalized.

Single-precision floats are already dangerously short for
many computations.  (Oh the dear old B6700 with 39 bits of
precision in single-precision floats...)  Half-precision
floats actually have less than half the precision of singles
(11 bits instead of 23).  It's probably best to think of
binary 16 as a form of compression for Float, and to write
stuff that will read half-precision from a binary stream as
single-precision, and conversely stuff that will accept
single-precision values and write them to a binary stream in
half-precision form.