\chapter{Physical Limitations on Precision}\label{BackgroundHardware}

This chapter will focus on the physical limitations on precision due to hardware. It will describe the traditional approaches to working with real numbers and the current state of the art.

NOTE: Depending on how much I get into the VHDL stuff, this chapter may seem less relevant to the actual research we are doing and it might be very short.
However I think even if I do not actually do any hardware designs, a literature review about precision of numbers would not be complete if it only mentioned software algorithms.



\section{Real Number Representations}

This section will discuss representations of real numbers in hardware, including the trivial: fixed point, IEEE floating points, and anything else I find that is interesting.


\section{Floating Point Units}

This section will give an overview of FPUs, focusing on IEEE.

\section{Graphical Processing Units}

This section will discuss anything relevant we can find on GPUs, but will probably be very short.

