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Comparing Different Decodings for Posit Arithmetic

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Next Generation Arithmetic (CoNGA 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13253))

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Abstract

Posit arithmetic has caught the attention of the research community as one of the most promising alternatives to the IEEE 754 standard for floating-point arithmetic. However, the recentness of the posit format makes its hardware less mature and thus more expensive than the floating-point hardware. Most approaches proposed so far decode posit numbers in a similar manner as classical floats. Recently, a novel decoding approach has been proposed, which in contrast with the previous one, considers negative posits to have a negative fraction. In this paper, we present a generic implementation for the latter and offer comparisons of posit addition and multiplication units based on both schemes. ASIC synthesis reveals that this alternative approach enables a faster way to perform operations while reducing the area, power and energy of the functional units. What is more, the proposed posit operators are shown to improve the state-of-the-art of implementations in terms of area, power and energy consumption.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/artecs-group/Flo-Posit/tree/6fd1776.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/manish-kj/PACoGen/tree/5f6572c.

  3. 3.

    https://gitlab.inria.fr/lforget/marto/tree/2f053a56.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge Isaac Yonemoto for the feedback and explanations on his insight of posit decoding. This work was supported by a 2020 Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators, from BBVA Foundation, whose id is PR2003_20/01, by the EU(FEDER) and the Spanish MINECO under grant RTI2018-093684-B-I00, and by the CM under grant S2018/TCS-4423.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Complutense University of Madrid, 28040, Madrid, Spain

    Raul Murillo, David Mallasén, Alberto A. Del Barrio & Guillermo Botella

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  1. Raul Murillo
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  2. David Mallasén
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  3. Alberto A. Del Barrio
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  4. Guillermo Botella
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Correspondence to Raul Murillo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    John Gustafson

  2. University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

    Vassil Dimitrov

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Murillo, R., Mallasén, D., Del Barrio, A.A., Botella, G. (2022). Comparing Different Decodings for Posit Arithmetic. In: Gustafson, J., Dimitrov, V. (eds) Next Generation Arithmetic. CoNGA 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13253. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09779-9_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09779-9_6

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