English

Relative error due to a single bit-flip in floating-point arithmetic

Numerical Analysis 2013-04-17 v1

Abstract

We consider the error due to a single bit-flip in a floating point number. We assume IEEE 754 double precision arithmetic, which encodes binary floating point numbers in a 64-bit word. We assume that the bit-flip happens randomly so it has equi-probability (1/64) to hit any of the 64 bits. Since we want to mitigate the assumption on our initial floating-point number, we assume that it is uniformly picked among all normalized number. With this framework, we can summarize our findings as follows. The probability for a single bit flip to cause a relative error less than 10^-11 in a normalized floating-point number is above 25%; The probability for a single bit flip to cause a relative error less than 10^-6 in a normalized floating-point number is above 50%; Etc.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1304.4292,
  title  = {Relative error due to a single bit-flip in floating-point arithmetic},
  author = {Bradley R. Lowery},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1304.4292},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

6 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T00:00:11.277Z