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The x86 extended-precision format is an 80-bit format first implemented in the Intel 8087 math coprocessor and is supported by all processors that are based on the x86 design that incorporate a floating-point unit (FPU).
An extended precision format extends a basic format by using more precision and more exponent range. An extendable precision format allows the user to specify the precision and exponent range. An implementation may use whatever internal representation it chooses for such formats; all that needs to be defined are its parameters ( b , p , and emax ).
Double-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP64 or float64) is a floating-point number format, usually occupying 64 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. Double precision may be chosen when the range or precision of single precision would be insufficient.
These include: as noted above, computing all expressions and intermediate results in the highest precision supported in hardware (a common rule of thumb is to carry twice the precision of the desired result, i.e. compute in double precision for a final single-precision result, or in double extended or quad precision for up to double-precision ...
Mixed-precision arithmetic is used in the field of machine learning, since gradient descent algorithms can use coarse and efficient half-precision floats for certain tasks, but can be more accurate if they use more precise but slower single-precision floats.
Arbitrary-precision arithmetic can also be used to avoid overflow, which is an inherent limitation of fixed-precision arithmetic. Similar to an automobile's odometer display which may change from 99999 to 00000, a fixed-precision integer may exhibit wraparound if numbers grow too large to represent at the fixed level of precision.
With gcc on Linux, 80-bit extended precision is the default; on several BSD operating systems (FreeBSD and OpenBSD), double-precision mode is the default, and long double operations are effectively reduced to double precision. [22] (NetBSD 7.0 and later, however, defaults to 80-bit extended precision [23]).
This alternative definition is significantly more widespread: machine epsilon is the difference between 1 and the next larger floating point number.This definition is used in language constants in Ada, C, C++, Fortran, MATLAB, Mathematica, Octave, Pascal, Python and Rust etc., and defined in textbooks like «Numerical Recipes» by Press et al.