  Customizing the precision of data can provide attractive trade-offs between
accuracy and hardware resources. We propose a novel form of vector computing
aimed at arrays of custom-precision floating point data. We represent these
vectors in bitslice format. Bitwise instructions are used to implement
arithmetic circuits in software that operate on customized bit-precision.
Experiments show that this approach can be efficient for vectors of
low-precision custom floating point types, while providing arbitrary bit
precision.
