Numpy octuple precision floats and 128 bit ints. Why and how?

Question

This is mostly a question out of curiosity. I noticed that the numpy test suite contains tests for 128 bit integers, and the numerictypes module refers to int128, float256 (octuple precision?), and other types that don't seem to map to numpy dtypes on my machine.

My machine is 64bit, yet I can use quadruple 128bit floats (but not really). I suppose that if it's possible to emulate quadruple floats in software, one can theoretically also emulate octuple floats and 128bit ints. On the other hand, until just now I had never heard of either 128bit ints or octuple precision floating point before. Why is there a reference to 128bit ints and 256bit floats in numpy's numerictypes module if there are no corresponding dtypes, and how can I use those?

Answer 1

This is a very interesting question and probably there are reasons related to python, to computing and/or to hardware. While not trying to give a full answer, here is what I would go towards...

First note that the types are defined by the language and can be different from your hardware architecture. For example you could even have doubles with an 8-bits processor. Of course any arithmetic involves multiple CPU instructions, making the computation much slower. Still, if your application requires it, it might be worth it or even required (better being late than wrong, especially if say you are running a simulation for a say bridge stability...) So where is 128bit precision required? Here's the wikipedia article on it...

One more interesting detail is that when we say a computer is say 64-bit, this is not fully describing the hardware. There are a lot of pieces that can each be (and at least have been at times) different bits: The computational registers in the CPU, the memory addressing scheme / memory registers and the different buses with most important the buss from CPU to memory.

-The ALU (arithmetic and logic unit) has registers that do calculations. Your machines are 64bit (not sure if that also mean they could do 2 32bit calculations at a similar time) This is clearly the most relevant quantity for this discussion. Long time ago, it used to be the case you could go out and buy a co-processor to speed that for calculations of higher precision...

-The Registers that hold memory addresses limit the memory the computer can see (directly) that is why computers that had 32bit memory registers could only see 2^32 bytes (or approx 4 GB) Notice that for 16bits, this becomes 65K which is very low. The OS can find ways around this limit, but not for a single program, so no program in a 32bit computer can normally have more than 4GB memmory.

-Notice that those limits are about bytes, not bits. That is because when referring and loading from memory we load bytes. In fact, the way this is done, loading a byte (8 bits) or 8 (64 bits == buss length for your computer) takes the same time. I ask for an address, and then get at once all bits through the bus. It can be that in an architecture all these quantities are not the same number of bits.