Decimal floating point (3 or 4 binary bits), and the rest of the significand uses the densely packed decimal (DPD) encoding. Unlike the binary integer significand version, where the exponent changed position and came before the significand, this encoding combines the leading 2 bits of the exponent and the leading digit (3 or 4 bits) of the significand into the five bits that follow the sign bit. This is followed by a fixed-offset exponent continuation field. Finally, the significand continuation field made of 2, 5, or 11 10-bit "declets", each encoding 3 decimal digits. If the first two bits after the sign bit
Decimal floating point different alternative methods. IBM POWER6 and newer POWER processors include DFP in hardware, as does the IBM System z9 (and z10). SilMinds offers SilAx, a configurable vector DFP coprocessor. IEEE 754-2008 defines this in more detail. Fujitsu also has 64-bit Sparc processors with DFP in hardware. Microsoft C#, or .NET, uses System.Decimal. The IEEE 754-2008 standard defines 32-, 64- and 128-bit decimal floating-point representations. Like the binary floating-point formats, the number is divided into a sign, an exponent, and a significand. Unlike binary floating-point, numbers are not necessarily normalized; values with few significant digits have multiple possible representations: 1×10=0.1×10=0.01×10, etc.