IBM Floating Point Architecture

IBM Floating Point Architecture

IBM System/360 computers, and subsequent machines based on that architecture (mainframes), support a hexadecimal floating-point format.

In comparison to IEEE 754 floating-point, the IBM floating-point format has a longer significand, and a shorter exponent. All IBM floating-point formats have 7 bits of exponent with a bias of 64. The normalized range of representable numbers are from 16-65 to 1663 (approx. 5.39761 × 10-79 to 7.237005 × 1075).

The number is represented as the following formula: (-1)sign × 0.significand × 16exponent-64

Read more about IBM Floating Point Architecture:  Single-precision 32-bit, Double-precision 64-bit, Extended-precision 128-bit, Arithmetic Operations, IEEE 754 On IBM Mainframes, Special Uses, Systems Which Use Base-16 Excess-64 Floating-Point Format

Famous quotes containing the words floating, point and/or architecture:

    The structure was designed by an old sea captain who believed that the world would end in a flood. He built a home in the traditional shape of the Ark, inverted, with the roof forming the hull of the proposed vessel. The builder expected that the deluge would cause the house to topple and then reverse itself, floating away on its roof until it should land on some new Ararat.
    —For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

    But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)