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4.5: half-precision floating point for ARM Cortex A9


I just want to give folks a heads-up on this, to avoid possible duplication of effort:

I will be submitting patches to implement half-precision floating point support for the ARM Cortex A9 at some point after trunk re-opens for new features. Half-precision (16-bit) floating point is a new feature in the IEEE 754-2008 standard and some of the pieces I've added for C and C++ language support are not ARM-specific. However, since ARM had an existing implementation in their own RealView compiler already, we've pretty much copied what they did in terms of syntax and semantics. The main peculiarity is that this is a storage format only, not an arithmetic format, so all __fp16 values are promoted to float in expressions much the same way that char and short are promoted to int.

I originally made these changes on a 4.3-based toolchain and am just now starting to update the patches and clean them up for submission, now that it looks like we are getting close to forking 4.4. Since this is currently a background task for me, it'll likely be a week or two before I have anything ready to post.

-Sandra


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