Floating point number representation

Running head: FLOATING POINT NUMBER REPRESENTATION
Floating Point Number Representation
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1FLOATING POINT NUMBER REPRESENTATION
Table of Contents
Specification of Floating point number......................................................................................2
IEEE-754 32-bit Single-Precision Floating-Point Numbers..................................................2
IEEE-754 64-bit Double-Precision Floating-Point Numbers................................................3
Difference between Floating point number and fixed point representation...............................4
Reference....................................................................................................................................5

2FLOATING POINT NUMBER REPRESENTATION
Specification of Floating point number
IEEE-754 32-bit Single-Precision Floating-Point Numbers
The IEEE-754 is a number format on the computer system that occupies 4 bytes of
memory in the computer system. It is also referred to as binary32 as the representation
requires only 32 bits of memory. The format of the IEEE-754 32 bit single precision format is
represented below:
Figure: Single precision format
Source: Kumar & Basha, 2016
The IEEE 754 32 bit Single precision format consists of three components:
 Sign bit: 1 bit
 Exponent bit: 8 bit
 Significand precision: 24 in which 23 bits are explicitly stored.
The signed bit represents the sign of the integer which represents positive as well as
negative values. The 8 bits represents the exponent in signed format ranging from -127 to 128
as well as unsigned format ranging from 0 to 255 (Hou et al., 2017). The true significant bit is
represented in the 23 fraction bits which following the exponent bit.
An example of the IEEE 754 32 bit single precision format: