The new Half type is composed of 16 bits and will be geared towards speeding up machine learning workflows by enabling faster computation and smaller storage requirements at the expense of precision.

In the computer, all data are represented as binary digits (bits), and eight binary digits make up one byte. For example, the upper case letter A is 0101001. Numbers however can take several forms.

The term floating point is derived from the fact that there is no fixed number of digits before and after the decimal point; namely, the decimal point can float. There are also representations in ...