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From: Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Misc: Applications of small floating point formats.
Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2024 11:47:01 +0200
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Jul 2024 18:31:35 -0500, BGB wrote:
> 
>> Binary16 is useful for graphics and audio processing.
> 
> The common format for CG work is OpenEXR, and that allows for 32-bit and
> even 64-bit floats, per pixel component. So for example R-G-B-Alpha is 4
> components.
> 
>> The 8-bit formats get a bit more niche; main use-cases mostly to save
>> memory.
> 
> Heavily used in AI work.

The nicest property of fp8, as seen from a GPUs point of view, is that 
arbitrary operations can be seen as texture map lookups. I don't think 
that's how they are implemented but an 8x8->16 FMUL would only need a 
few very small lookup tables, probably doable even on a regular CPU with 
16-element permute operations.

Terje

-- 
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"