Agreed, but in terms of efficiency wouldn’t it make more sense to put the sign bit right before the mantissa in order to keep the memory layout more consistent with powers of two?
Having the sign bit in front, makes them compare like sign-bit-integers and if they are compared/sorted like 2s-complement integers, the negatives are reversed but still come after the positives.
Agreed, but in terms of efficiency wouldn’t it make more sense to put the sign bit right before the mantissa in order to keep the memory layout more consistent with powers of two?
Having the sign bit in front, makes them compare like sign-bit-integers and if they are compared/sorted like 2s-complement integers, the negatives are reversed but still come after the positives.
I doubt the layout is relevant there as the FPU should be just physically wired to handle it.