Because there is no "official" BF16 standard (beyond interchange
format) and because other vendors have made incompatible choices (so
no de-facto standard either), we will need to define the RISC-V BF16
arithmetic standard.

Some people are working towards this as part of alternate FP group
proposal - there are a few details that need some thought.

Once this is specified, there can be reference implementations
produced.

Krste

On Fri, 13 Nov 2020 09:11:18 -0800, "CDS" <cohen.steed@...> said:

| In support of Open Source Software and publicly released modeling schemes, does the Vector Task Group have a recommendation for arithmetic
| reference? The published ISSs can provide checking results from a heavy-lifting simulation perspective, but even they must rely on something to
| model and calculate arithmetic results. The IEEE-754 encodings are handled by some easily-found solutions - what about BFloat16 and other encodings?
|

In support of Open Source Software and publicly released modeling schemes, does the Vector Task Group have a recommendation for arithmetic reference? The published ISSs can provide checking results from a heavy-lifting simulation perspective, but even they must rely on something to model and calculate arithmetic results. The IEEE-754 encodings are handled by some easily-found solutions - what about BFloat16 and other encodings?