The bfloat16 (brain floating point)[1][2] floating-point format is a computer number format occupying 16 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point.
[3] It preserves the approximate dynamic range of 32-bit floating-point numbers by retaining 8 exponent bits, but supports only an 8-bit precision rather than the 24-bit significand of the binary32 format.
Bfloat16 is used to reduce the storage requirements and increase the calculation speed of machine learning algorithms.
[10][15] On these platforms, bfloat16 may also be used in mixed-precision arithmetic, where bfloat16 numbers may be operated on and expanded to wider data types.
The minimum and maximum values of the exponent field (00H and FFH) are interpreted specially, like in the IEEE 754 standard formats.