Hi
John Gustafson was in town (Wellington, NZ) for the Multicore
World Conference 2016 ( http://www.multicoreworld.com/)
conference. I caught up with him, tonight, and spoke to him for
about two hours. Here is a quick summary of what we discussed.
John has just redesigned Unums, to address the design issues in
version 1.0. He presented his Powerpoint presentation to the
conference, with the details of Unums 2.0 (this is a tentative
name at present). Its a improved design, but I will only brief
detail it: "It will have more dynamic range with 16-bit values
than IEEE half-precision, but only by a small amount. Still
remarkable to be uniformly better in dynamic range and precision,
with support for inexact values and perfect reciprocation. If a
language supports just one unum data type, John believes it
should be the 16-bit one". John has agreed to provide a link to
the Powerpoint presentation, in a couple of weeks, and then
later, a link to his new published paper on the subject, when it
is ready. There will likely be a new book, building on version
1.0, and, again, tentatively titled 'Unums 2.0'. I also discussed
with him, about integrating it with D. At the present, there is a
'C' codebase under construction, but this could be rewritten in D
in the future. D may require some language changes, and a new
phobos library, to support this advanced functionality. Of course
Walter will have decide if he wants this advanced numbering
system as a part of D.
As an aside, John mentioned that Rex Computing
(http://www.rexcomputing.com/) is using Unums with the Julia
language, for their new hyper-efficient processor architecture.
It will be interesting to see what these whiz kids deliver in
time.
cheers
Nick
- Re: Implement the "unum" representation... Nick B via Digitalmars-d
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