How to Use floating-point in a Sentence

floating-point

adjective
  • There’s an awful lot of bit patterns in floating-point arithmetic no one ever uses.
    — Dina Genkina, IEEE Spectrum, 18 Oct. 2022
  • And why are the numbers for floating-point operations per second so much lower?
    — IEEE Spectrum, 25 June 2018
  • The bill applies only to models trained with more than 10^26 floating-point operations or with a compute cost above $100 million.
    — Jason Snyder, Forbes.com, 24 May 2026
  • Nvidia’s recently announced Hopper GPU includes support for even smaller, 8-bit floating-point numbers.
    — Dina Genkina, IEEE Spectrum, 18 Oct. 2022
  • Exascale supercomputers can, by definition, surpass an exaflop—more than a quintillion floating-point operations per second.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 18 Dec. 2022
  • For digital signal processing, floating-point arithmetic simplifies the job of maintaining precision, a near-impossible burden in the most demanding algorithms.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 30 June 2025
  • The chip has 8-bit floating-point capabilities, but so far the smallest precision the company has engaged on the chip for MLPerf training purposes is bfloat 16.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 17 Nov. 2022
  • Typically for training, the computer must be able to calculate with relatively high precision, often using 32-bit floating-point operations.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 29 Dec. 2016
  • Our research shows that starting at around 10 16 floating-point operations per second (tens of petaflops) the superconducting computer handily becomes more power efficient than its classical cousin.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 15 May 2024
  • Total computational resources in the economy could eventually reach 10⁵⁴ floating-point operations per second.
    — Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 4 Apr. 2026
  • In parallel with the development of DSP2, Jim led a new architecture, DSP32, which used floating-point arithmetic.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 30 June 2025
  • For reference, a PFLOPS represents one quadrillion (10^15) floating-point operations per second (1,000 trillion).
    — Christopher McFadden, Interesting Engineering, 20 Dec. 2025
  • Nuclear weapon simulators, cryptographers, and others want exascale supercomputers, capable of 1,000 petaflops—1 million trillion floating-point operations per second—or greater.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 24 Feb. 2016
  • Their speed is measured in FLOPS, floating-point operations per second, and the biggest systems now sustain exaFLOPS on a rigorous test called LINPACK (HPL).
    — Kaif Shaikh, Interesting Engineering, 2 Sep. 2025
  • According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), China has achieved 1,882 exaflops – short for exa floating-point operations per second – which translates to 1,882 quintillion, or billion billion, calculations per second, reported SCMP.
    — Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, Interesting Engineering, 23 Apr. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'floating-point.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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