Talk:Half-precision floating-point format

This page confuses increased and decreased precision. Surely increased dynamic range is double-precision : what does 'precsie' mean ? Half-precision reduces storage requirements instead !

ie Half of what ? Hmmm ... Maybe they should be one page ?

=> To me it was perfectly clear: the precision is the amount of bits/digits past the floating point. An integer is very unprecise, because between every two integers there's a big range of other numbers. e.g. what if you want to drink 3.5 glasses of milk instead of 3 or 4? An integer is not precise enough to represent this. A single precision floating point has no problem with 3.5, or even 3.000 005 (dunnow the exact amount of zeros allowed, but my point is clear). Single precision takes up 4bytes/32bits though, so it's quite memory hungry. To combine the best of 2 worlds (small memory footprints of ints but good precision of singles/floats), half precision float/a float with 16bits/2bytes memory representation is ideal. You trade the loss of precision for the gain in less memory footprint. Indeed, with those 2 bytes, 3.000 005 is not representable. 3.05 is representable though.