CONFIGURING FLOATING POINT OPERATIONS IN A PROGRAMMABLE DEVICE

A programmable device is programmed to perform arithmetic operations in an internal format that, unlike known standard formats that store numbers in normalized form and require normalization after each computational step, stores numbers in unnormalized form and does not require normalization after each step. Numbers are converted into unnormalized form at the beginning of an operation and converted back to normalized form at the end of the operation. If necessary to avoid data loss, a number may be normalized after an intermediate step. To conserve resources, rather than configuring the every intermediate operation to have the same mantissa size, in the internal format the mantissa size may start out smaller and grow after each operation.