Itanium® Architecture for Programmers: Understanding 64-Bit Processors and EPIC Principles

Chapter 8. Floating-Point Operations

Students learning science encounter the usefulness of scientific notation for representing numeric values, especially in situations where the magnitudes vary widely, such as the masses of an electron (9 × 10 ^–31 kg) and the planet Earth (6 × 10⁺²⁴ kg). Today, one can purchase a scientific calculator, which works with numbers spanning magnitudes from 10^–99 to 10⁺⁹⁹, for only a little more money than a standard eight-digit calculator. Indeed, a proper education in the quantitative sciences includes the appreciation that, for example, 6.022137 × 10²³ expresses only what is currently known of the magnitude of Avogadro's number (the number of atoms of isotopically pure ¹²C having a total mass of exactly 12 grams). ...