[Elecraft] Different focus

[Rich NE1EE]

On 2021-01-25 11:25:-0500, Bill Frantz wrote:

>IEEE Binary Floating Point assumes (except in case of a very small, de-normalized number), that the high order bit of the mantissa is a one. With this assumption, it doesn't need to actually represent the one in memory. So, it has 8 bits of exponent, 1 bit of sign, and 24 bits of mantissa crammed into 32 bits. It should be able to handle the full precision of a 24 bit AtoD converter.
>
>73 Bill AE6JV

I designed a hardware-software system to create thermal ex-core neutron energy spectrum signatures in operating pressurized water nuclear plants. We used 32 bit integers as far as we could, even though the ADCs were only 12 bit, because speed was of the essence, and there was a lot of math going down. We used 32 v. 16 bit integers because the math took results into that range. I have not kept up with speeds in hardware, but imagine that the IEEE 754 in hardware must be pretty fast.

~R~
72/73 de Rich NE1EE
The Dusty Key
On the banks of the Piscataqua