Has any company formally announced hardware decimal floating-point support?
Yes. IBM announced on 18 April 2007 hardware decimal floating point facilities for IBM z9 EC and z9 BC: “IBM is implementing hardware decimal floating point facilities in System z9. The facilities include 4-, 8-, and 16-byte data formats, an encoded decimal (base-10) representation for data, instructions for performing decimal floating point computations, and an instruction which performs data conversions to and from the decimal floating point representation. Base 10 arithmetic is used for most business and financial computation. To date, floating point computation used for work typically done in decimal arithmetic has involved frequent necessary data conversions and approximation to represent decimal numbers. This has made floating point arithmetic complex and error prone for programmers using it in applications where the data is typically decimal data. Initial software support for hardware decimal floating point is limited to High Level Assembler support running in z/OS and z/OS.e on
