The original post that started this thread was saying that chips should support ... | Hacker News

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		jey on Oct 10, 2013 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Future instruction set: AVX-512 The original post that started this thread was saying that chips should support decimal floating point natively in silicon instead of only base-2 floating point. Yes, those are different things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE754#Basic_formats

drewcrawford on Oct 11, 2013 [–]

I am well aware of the difference between base 2 and base 10.

You asked "why not just use doubles?" And my answer is "because one often multiplies by powers of ten."

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