Glossary
Decimal Floating Point (DFP)
A hardware-level numeric format for exact decimal arithmetic, added to the POWER6 processor, useful for financial and commercial calculations that binary floating point handles imprecisely.
Decimal floating point (DFP) represents decimal values exactly, avoiding the small rounding errors binary floating-point arithmetic introduces for values like currency. POWER6 was the first Power processor generation to implement DFP directly in hardware.