IEEE 754 Floating Point Standard

Learn about the conventions followed in the IEEE 754 Floating Point Standard, which is the most widely followed standard in computing systems.

The need for a standard

Across the lessons in this chapter, we have built on the rules of our 88-bit floating point representation. However, we made our choices arbitrarily or based on convention. We could have just as easily decided that the mantissa had 33 bits and the exponent had 44. In reality, the 88-bit representation is just a toy example we used to illustrate some key concepts.

In the real world, computers use 3232 and 6464 bit floating points, and there’s a myriad of ways the floating point conventions could be developed for each.

It makes sense then that a standard convention would be developed for all computer manufacturers to follow. This is exactly what the IEEE 754 Floating Point Standard is.

Another reason we need a standard is that we need conventions to represent numbers that are not included in the floating point representation we have developed so far. This includes small numbers and 00.

In the rest of this lesson we will go through the conventions of the IEEE 754 format one by one.

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