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

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