[Beignet] [PATCH 1/8] Backend: Add half float as a new type.

[Matt Turner]

On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 1:25 AM,  <junyan.he at inbox.com> wrote:
> From: Junyan He <junyan.he at linux.intel.com>
>
> Because the CPU of X86 does not support half float
> instructions, there is no support for half float operations.
> So we introduce the half class to handle the operations for
> half float using llvm's APFloat utility.

Ivybridge and newer have the F16C instruction set
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F16C) which offers instructions to
convert half-precision <-> single-precision floats.

I don't know if it's valuable to use it, but it's there.