MATLAB: Does MATLAB support quadruple precision – 128-bit floating point arithmetics

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I need more precision than offered by the standard double data type in MATLAB. I am looking for a quadruple precision in MATLAB.

Best Answer

The floating point arithmetic format that occupies 128 bits of storage is known as binary128 or quadruple precision.

The following blog post by MathWorks' Chief Mathematician Cleve Moler describes an implementation of quadruple precision programmed entirely in the MATLAB language:

https://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2017/05/22/quadruple-precision-128-bit-floating-point-arithmetic/

Please note that quadruple precision is not available as of MATLAB R2018b. As a workaround, it is possible to obtain more precision using Variable Precision Arithmetic from the Symbolic Math Toolbox. Another possibility is to use the Fixed-Point Toolbox to obtain more precision. Note that in either case, the numbers will not be of the floating point format.

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Is the fixed-point number’s FractionLength value greater than its WordLength value

The terminology used in fixed-point math can be confusing, but it looks like there is nothing wrong with the FractionLength value, as it is not measured in terms of number of bits. The documentation at the following location discusses scaling of fixed-point values:

 <http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/toolbox/fixedpoint/ug/f6389.html>

"fraction length" is defined to be the negative of the fixed exponent value. Thus, even though we are dealing with a 16-bit word length, there is no requirement for the fraction length to be less than 16.

The documentation at the following location discusses the concept of fraction length that is greater than word length or negative.

 <http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/toolbox/filterdesign/index.html?/access/helpdesk/help/toolbox/filterdesign/ug/f8-109180.html>

Under the secton titled Property Details for Fixed Point Filter, there is a sub-section titled Notes About Fraction Length, Word Length, and Precision.

MATLAB: How to represent a hexadecimal string in a 128-bit format in MATLAB

You can change the string representation and then use ‘uint8’ so that the two hexadecimal characters fit into one byte.

Please find the sample code below with the necessary comments.

   % Get UUID and store as character
    uuid=char(java.util.UUID.randomUUID);
    val=uuid;
    % Remove the '-' to get the hexadecimal values
    val(val == '-') = '';
    % Turn 'val' into string elements each representing bytes
    % reshape(val,2,16) gives a 2x16 char array
    % permute(reshapedvalue,[2 1])' gives a 1x16 string array with each element
    % of the string representing a byte
    byte_hex = string(permute(reshape(val,2,16),[2 1]))';
    % Create an array of bytes
    bytes_vector = uint8(hex2dec(byte_hex));
    % dec2hex is to verify that the byte set is as expected
    dec2hex(bytes_vector);

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Related Solutions

MATLAB: Is the fixed-point number’s FractionLength value greater than its WordLength value

MATLAB: How to represent a hexadecimal string in a 128-bit format in MATLAB

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