Why aren’t Floating-Point Decimal numbers hardware accelerated like Floating-Point Binary numbers?

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The latest revision of the IEEE 754:2008 standard does indeed define hardware decimal floating point numbers, using the representations shown in the software referenced in the question. The previous version of the standard (IEEE 754:1985) did not provide decimal floating point numbers. Most current hardware implements the 1985 standard and not the 2008 standard, but IBM’s iSeries computers using Power6 chips have such support, and so do the z10 mainframes.

The standardization effort for decimal floating point was spearheaded by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM UK, who has a web site full of useful information (including the software in the question). It is likely that in due course, other hardware manufacturers will also introduce decimal floating point units on their chips, but I have not heard a statement of direction for when (or whether) Intel might add one. Intel does have optimized software libraries for it.

The C standards committee is looking to add support for decimal floating point and that work is TR 24732.

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