X. Sun et al. (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3454287.3454728) published
a paper showing that an FP format with 4 bits of exponent, 3 bits of
significand and an exponent bias of 11 would work quite well for ML
applications.
Google hardware supports a variant of this format where 0x80 is used to
represent NaN, as in the Float8E4M3FNUZ format. Just like the
Float8E4M3FNUZ format, this format does not support -0 and values which
would map to it will become +0.
This format is proposed for inclusion in OpenXLA's StableHLO dialect: https://github.com/openxla/stablehlo/pull/1308
As part of inclusion in that dialect, APFloat needs to know how to
handle this format.
Why are there no changes needed for the Itanium mangler? And when did we start adding a bunch of esoteric float formats? Was there an RFC for this that I missed? (If I did miss something, then sorry for the noise.)