Floating point versus fixed point: what are the pros/cons?

Question

Floating point type represents a number by storing its significant digits and its exponent separately on separate binary words so it fits in 16, 32, 64 or 128 bits.

Fixe

Answer 1

You need to be careful when discussing "precision" in this context.

For the same number of bits in representation the maximum fixed point value has more significant bits than any floating point value (because the floating point format has to give some bits away to the exponent), but the minimum fixed point value has fewer than any non-denormalized floating point value (because the fixed point value wastes most of its mantissa in leading zeros).

Also depending on the way you divide the fixed point number up, the floating point value may be able to represent smaller numbers meaning that it has a more precise representation of "tiny but non-zero".

And so on.