### A good answer might be:

Both. Double precision numbers have more bits for the exponent (so the range of values is increased) and more bits in the mantissa (so the precision is increased).

# MIPS Floating Point

Floating point on MIPS was originally done in a separate chip called coprocessor 1 (also called the FPA for Floating Point Accelerator). Modern MIPS chips include floating point operations on the main processor chip. But the instructions sometimes act as if there were still a separate chip.

MIPS has 32 single precision (32 bit) floating point registers.

- The registers are named $f0 – $f31
- $f0 is not special (it can hold any bit pattern, not just zero).
- Single precision floating point load, store, arithmetic, and other instructions work with these registers.

### QUESTION 2:

(Memory Test: ) Why is $f0 not hard-wired to floating point zero, like register $0 is hard-wired to integer zero?