[Haskell-cafe] 16 bit floating point data in Haskell?

[Olex P]

Okay looks like FFI is the only way to go, Thanks.

Cheers,
Oleksandr.

On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 9:50 PM, wren ng thornton <wren at freegeek.org> wrote:

> Olex P wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Yes, I mean "sizeOf 2". It's useful not only on GPUs but also in "normal"
>> software. Think of huge data sets in computer graphics (particle clouds,
>> volumetric data, images etc.) Some data (normals, density, temperature and
>> so on) can be easily represented as float 16 making files 200 GB instead
>> of
>> 300 GB. Good benefits.
>>
>
> I think, if you're going to want any kind of performance and portability,
> then you'll have to use the FFI to wrap some C code that performs the
> primops. From there you can define the instances for Floating, RealFloat,
> etc. to use them like normal types in Haskell.
>
> There are a number of embedded systems that still use 24-bit floating
> registers, so it'd be nice to provide both Float16 and Float24. But since
> these aren't natively supported in C, it's not clear how best to write the
> primops so they're portable across GPUs and embedded systems.
>
> --
> Live well,
> ~wren
>
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