Overview of New Floating-Point Standards: IEEE P3109 (May 2024 interim report) and Open Compute Project OCP8/MX 1.0

1985 saw a release of one of the most important standards in computing, the IEEE 754-1985 floating-point standard, which is at the foundation of most modern computing systems in use today. Two revisions of the standard, IEEE 754-2008 and IEEE 754-2019, have since been released. A working group for the IEEE 754-2029 is already assembled and some of the School of Computer Science staff are participating. In parallel, low-precision arithmetic that does not follow the IEEE 754 rules is gaining momentum, with ~30% of the TOP500 high-performance computers containing hardware for computing on relatively low precision numbers. IEEE P3109 will be a separate standard specifically for low-precision floating-point arithmetic, and it has been in the works for several years, with multiple interim reports having been publicly released; School of Computer Science staff are also participating and the speaker is part of the working group that is meeting fortnightly. Finally, OCP8 and MX are non-IEEE floating-point standards for 4-, 6-, and 8-bit formats that have been released at the end of 2023. This talk will be a comprehensive overview of the standardisation of floating-point arithmetic as it stands today.