GNU bug report logs - #68871
Can't use od to print half-precision floats

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Message #17 received at 68871 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Pádraig Brady <P <at> draigBrady.com>
To: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>,
 "Rozenberg, Eyal (Consultant)" <Eyal.Rozenberg <at> gehealthcare.com>,
 68871 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#68871: Can't use od to print half-precision floats
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2024 21:59:29 +0000

On 01/02/2024 19:16, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Oh, and another thought: suppose someone wants to use od on bfloat16_t
> values? They're popular in machine learning applications, and likely
> will be more popular than float16_t overall. See:
> 
> https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-alpha/2024-February/154382.html

True. I suppose we would select between these like:

 -t f2, -t fh = IEEE half precision
        -t fb = brain floating point

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.

cheers,
Pádraig

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