Re: FP16 Support?

Kohei KaiGai <kaigai(at)heterodb(dot)com> writes:
> How about your thought for support of half-precision floating point,
> FP16 in short?

This sounds like a whole lotta work for little if any gain. There's not
going to be any useful performance gain from using half-width floats
except in an environment where it's the individual FLOPs that dominate
your costs. PG is not designed for that sort of high-throughput
number-crunching, and it's not likely to get there anytime soon.

When we can show real workloads where float32 ops are actually the
dominant time sink, it would be appropriate to think about whether
float16 is a useful solution. I don't deny that we could get there
someday, but I think putting in float16 now would be a fine example
of having your priorities reversed.

regards, tom lane