On 2017-11-13 20:21:47 -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > Kohei KaiGai <kai...@heterodb.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.
Agree that there's no performance argument. I think you could kinda sorta make an argument for higher storage density in cases where a lot of floats are stored in the database. I'd personally still consider that not worthwhile to invest time in, but ... Greetings, Andres Freund
