Actually they have changed their position on this in the latest, now ratified spec; the quire is now just a data type. How you implement it is up to you, but you can certainly have more than one.
A lot of the material about posits is out of date, including the Cult of Posits. The +/- Inf has been replace with NaR. As an aside: interestingly MININT maps to and from NaR when converting between posits and integers.
good to know, but even if you can have more than 1 semantically, in hardware, they take 512 bits for 32 bit, or 2048 for 64 bit, and most CPUs only have 1 (occasionally 2) units of vector math per core, so I think it is unlikely that they would be able to efficiently work with multiple quires. 32 bit quires are possible, but 64 bit almost certainly aren't. Also, for vectorization, modern cpus are capable of doing 16x 32 bit fma at a time, but processing 16x 512 bits for a quire in a similar amount of time is totally out of the question.
> Also, for vectorization, modern cpus are capable of doing 16x 32 bit fma at a time, but processing 16x 512 bits for a quire in a similar amount of time is totally out of the question.
I'd be worried about space, but I'm not sure why time would be an issue? I'd assume a big quire would have some kind of delayed carry mechanism.
even with a delayed carry, you still need to pump the data through the CPU. For a basic place where this becomes a problem, consider taking exp of each element in a vector. A vectorized version of this code will spend most of it's time computing a polynomial which is just 8 fmas (in 2 chains of 4). With a dedicated fma instruction, the cpu can do each of those fmas in 4 cycles, and overlap the chains, leading to a total time of 17 cycles (assuming 4 cycle fma which is fairly standard). Doing the same computation with quires would require moving around 16x as much data, which is impossible to do as quickly.
A lot of the material about posits is out of date, including the Cult of Posits. The +/- Inf has been replace with NaR. As an aside: interestingly MININT maps to and from NaR when converting between posits and integers.