I'm in labview working with very constrained ram. I have two arrays that require single precision since I need decimal points. However, single precision takes too much space for what I have, the decimal values I work with are within 0.00-1000.00.
Is there an intuitive way to pack these two arrays together so I can save some space? Or is there a different approach I can take?
If you need to represent 0.00 - 1000.00, you've got 100000 values. That cannot be represented in less than 17 (whole) bits. That means that to fit two numbers in, you'll need 34 bits. 34 bits is obviously more than you can fit in a 32 bit space. I suggest you try to limit your space of values. You could dedicate 11 bits to the integer value (0 - 1023) and 5 bits to the decimal value (0 to 0.96875 in chunks of 1/32 or 0.03125). Then you'll be able to fit two decimal values into one 32 bit space.
Just remember the extra bit manipulation you have to do for this is likely to have a small performance impact on your application.