Subject: bug#68871: Can't use od to print half-precision floats

From: "Rozenberg, Eyal (Consultant)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2024 14:35:31 +0000

Seems ok to me as a user. Note also that there is the TF32 format (tf for tensor-float), which takes up 32 bits, but only uses 19. So, the switches could be:

-t f2    IEEE half
-t fh    IEEE half
-t fb    brain
-t ft     tensor

or

-t ft4  tensor

(which indicates the 32-bitness)

Eyal

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]> 
Sent: Friday, 2 February 2024 3:47
To: Pádraig Brady <[email-masked]>; Rozenberg, Eyal (Consultant) <[email-masked]>; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: bug#68871: Can't use od to print half-precision floats

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On 2/1/24 13:59, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>
> bfloat16 looks like a truncated single precision IEEE, so we should be 
> able to just pad the extra 16 bits with zeros when converting to 
> single precision internally for processing.

Sounds good. This would mean od could work even the platform doesn't support bfloat16_t, since od.c could fall back on the above code (though I suppose it could be endianness-dependent).