Question: IEEE 754-2008 contains a half precision that is only 16 bits wide.

The left most bit is still the sign bit, the exponent is 5 bits wide and has a bias of 15, and the mantissa/significand is 10 bits long. A hidden 1 is assumed.

1) Please write down the bit pattern to represent -2.5625 X 10-1 assuming a version of this format, which uses an excess-16 format to store the exponent. Please show all the steps.

2) Please comment on how the range and accuracy of this 16-bit floating point format compares to the single precision IEEE 754 standard.