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floating-pointdoubleprecisionieee-754

Min and max precision of a denormalized double?


What are the maximum and minimum precision of a denormalized 64 bit floating point number following IEEE 754-2008? That is, what's the precision of a double at 2^-1022 and 2^-1074 respectively?

This question is similar, but it does not care about the actual numbers.


Solution

  • The precision of denormalized double precision floating point numbers gradually vanishes from 52 bits to 1 bit.

    Hence, the mechanism is called gradual underflow.