{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-accuracy-and-efficiency-of-posit","title":"The Accuracy and Efficiency of Posit Arithmetic","arxiv_id":"2109.08225","date":"2021-09-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Stefan Dan Ciocirlan","Dumitrel Loghin","Lavanya Ramapantulu","Nicolae Tapus","Yong Meng Teo"],"abstract":"Motivated by the increasing interest in the posit numeric format, in this paper we evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of posit arithmetic in contrast to the traditional IEEE 754 32-bit floating-point (FP32) arithmetic. We first design and implement a Posit Arithmetic Unit (PAU), called POSAR, with flexible bit-sized arithmetic suitable for applications that can trade accuracy for savings in chip area. Next, we analyze the accuracy and efficiency of POSAR with a series of benchmarks including mathematical computations, ML kernels, NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB), and Cifar-10 CNN. This analysis is done on our implementation of POSAR integrated into a RISC-V Rocket Chip core in comparison with the IEEE 754-based Floting Point Unit (FPU) of Rocket Chip. Our analysis shows that POSAR can outperform the FPU, but the results are not spectacular. For NPB, 32-bit posit achieves better accuracy than FP32 and improves the execution by up to 2%. However, POSAR with 32-bit posit needs 30% more FPGA resources compared to the FPU. For classic ML algorithms, we find that 8-bit posits are not suitable to replace FP32 because they exhibit low accuracy leading to wrong results. Instead, 16-bit posit offers the best option in terms of accuracy and efficiency. For example, 16-bit posit achieves the same Top-1 accuracy as FP32 on a Cifar-10 CNN with a speedup of 18%.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08225v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.08225v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-accuracy-and-efficiency-of-posit","repo_url":"https://github.com/dloghin/posar","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}