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Description
Background and motivation
The bfloat16 type provides the same number range as the 32-bit IEEE 754 single-precision floating point type, but with a reduced precision (24 bits -> 8 bits). This is useful for machine learning to improve memory utilization, and can be used to accelerate AI workloads via AVC-512 BP / and ARMv8.6-A instructions.
Adding this type would allow us to implement these new instructions sets, and provide a common base type for various machine learning libraries.
API Proposal
namespace System.Numerics
{
public readonly struct BFloat16
: IComparable,
IComparable<BFloat16>,
IEquatable<BFloat16>
{
public static BFloat16 Epsilon { get; }
public static BFloat16 MinValue { get; }
public static BFloat16 MaxValue { get; }
// Casting
public static explicit operator BFloat16(float value);
public static explicit operator BFloat16(double value);
public static explicit operator float(BFloat16 value);
public static explicit operator double(BFloat16 value);
// Comparison
public int CompareTo(object value);
public int CompareTo(BFloat16 value);
public static bool operator ==(BFloat16 left, BFloat16 right);
public static bool operator !=(BFloat16 left, BFloat16 right);
public static bool operator <(BFloat16 left, BFloat16 right);
public static bool operator >(BFloat16 left, BFloat16 right);
public static bool operator <=(BFloat16 left, BFloat16 right);
public static bool operator >=(BFloat16 left, BFloat16 right);
// Equality
public bool Equals(BFloat16 obj);
public override bool Equals(object? obj);
public override int GetHashCode();
// ToString override
public override string ToString();
}
}API Usage
BFloat16 bf16 = (BFloat16)1.0f; Alternative Designs
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Risks
No response