Compression of floating-point numbers for neural networks

Floating-point numbers are compressed for neural network computations. A compressor receives multiple operands, each operand having a floating-point representation of a sign bit, an exponent, and a fraction. The compressor re-orders the operands into a first sequence of consecutive sign bits, a second sequence of consecutive exponents, and a third sequence of consecutive fractions. The compressor then compresses the first sequence, the second sequence, and the third sequence to remove at least duplicate exponents. As a result, the compressor can losslessly generate a compressed data sequence.