8.2. Representations of Floating-Point Values
In Chapter 2, we introduced the IEEE representations for single- and double-precision floating-point values using 32 and 64 bits for storage, respectively. Since these representations are an industry standard, all modern computer systems store floating-point values in memory in the same manner, respecting big- or little-endian ordering.
The IEEE representations partition an information unit into fields for sign, exponent, and significand. The exponent is stored with an additive bias. The significand consists of an implicit binary 1 followed by a binary fraction (Section 2.5.2).
8.2.1. IEEE Special Values
Before we consider floating-point instructions, we need to provide more detail about how the IEEE ...
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