Stanford Seminar: Beyond Floating Point: Next Generation Computer Arithmetic

Abstract on the Stanford website, as well as link to slides: http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/170201.html

First 50 minutes or so is an overview on John Gustafson's unum's, followed by the introduction of "type 3 unums" that have two subtypes: Posits (discussed here), and Valids. In short, Posits have a greater mathematical accuracy AND dynamic range of floats, while in many cases also using fewer bits in the representation.

At around the 53 minute mark, the presentation switches over to Dr. Isaac Yonemoto (HN username: dnautics) who gives a live demonstration of a Julia implementation of Posits, showing it preforming favorably for both a FFT and neural network compared to low precision floats.