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20-bit processing

I didn't know anything about this until your original post, but let me see if I understand what the 20-bit thing from the 1990s was all about.

If you do a sequence of arithmetic calculations and round to the nearest, say, 0.001 after each calculation, you'll eventually end up with accumulated error of 0.003, 0.004, etc. If you chain enough of these rounded calculations, you'll lose an arbitrary amount of precision in the result. But if you round to the nearest 0.000001 after every step and save the rounding to 0.001 for the final result, you'll almost certainly get the one and only right answer. This is why calculators have internal precisions that are several digits longer than the number of digits they can display. In your words, it's like "headroom".

I'm guessing this is what 20-bit processing is -- adding 4 extra bits for the number-crunching parts so that you can chain a bunch of processing steps, and when you round to 16 bits at the end of the day, you get the right answer.

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