Half-precision floating-point format

In computing, half precision (sometimes called FP16 or float16) is a binary floating-point computer number format that occupies 16 bits (two bytes in modern computers) in computer memory. It is intended for storage of floating-point values in applications where higher precision is not essential, in particular image processing and neural networks.

Almost all modern uses follow the IEEE 754-2008 standard, where the 16-bit base-2 format is referred to as binary16, and the exponent uses 5 bits. This can express values in the range ±65,504, with the minimum value above 1 being 1 + 1/1024.

Depending on the computer, half-precision can be over an order of magnitude faster than double precision, e.g. 550 PFLOPS for half-precision vs 37 PFLOPS for double precision on one cloud provider.^[1]