It's odd. Someone told me about that on irc at the Time. People were feeling strongly about the topic. Quackery, mythomany,.. nobody wanted to hear about anything but IEEE standards.
Lots and lots of people have proposed replacements for IEEE floats that fix (or claim to fix) various problems with floats. 90% of them are utter nonsense, so many people default to assuming that any new one they encounter is also utter nonsense, and they usually turn out to be right.
> Quackery, mythomany,.. nobody wanted to hear about anything but IEEE standards.
Mostly because there is no good evidence that what is being proposed is better.
This isn't the olden days when it was difficult to demonstrate on a large enough CPU and dataset. Today we have cloud computing. If you create something better, you can demonstrate it by putting it into a numerics application and blow everybody away.
The CFD people are always looking for better solutions. The numerical simulation people are always constrained.
Until you do that, people have a right to blow you off.
That only really compares posits to Float16 in a domain where the paper admits roundoff error mostly isn't really an issue even at single precision.
I'd be much more interested to see how these handle stiff systems with multiple time constants. That's a domain where everything has problems and improvement is going to actually move some things from completely infeasible to actually simulatable.
That's a much stronger use case. And you don't have to worry about implementation efficiency since the improvement ratio is "infinity"--you went from can't do it at all to actually being able to do it.
