Hardware for converting floating-point to the microscaling (MX) format

Abstract: This paper proposes hardware converters for the microscaling format (MX-format), a reduced representation of floating-point numbers. We present an algorithm and a memory-free hardware model for converting 32 single-precision floating-point numbers to MX-format. The proposed model supports six different types of MX-format: E5M2, E4M3, E3M2, E2M3, E2M1, and INT8. The conversion process consists of three steps: calculating the maximum absolute value among 32 inputs, generating a shared scale, and producing 32 outputs in the selected MX-format type. The hardware converters were implemented in FPGA, and experimental results demonstrate.