Comment by segfaultbuserr

Another technique I've read about is "block" floating point. In many problems like signal processing or physics simulations, the order of magnitude of the data is often close to each other within a region. Instead of giving each float its own significand and exponent, they can be grouped together and shared to save some bandwidth or space in a hardware implementation for real-time processing. Unfortunately it's often not very suitable in software, as the non-standard word size is awkward to handle.