I'm sorry, are you asking for what purpose a scientist would need to multiply by a power of ten? Converting between units in scientific notation? Doing base 10 logarithms? Calculating things in decibels?
The original post that started this thread was saying that chips should support decimal floating point natively in silicon instead of only base-2 floating point. Yes, those are different things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE754#Basic_formats
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I'm sorry, are you asking for what purpose a scientist would need to multiply by a power of ten? Converting between units in scientific notation? Doing base 10 logarithms? Calculating things in decibels?
Maybe I have misunderstood the question.
The original post that started this thread was saying that chips should support decimal floating point natively in silicon instead of only base-2 floating point. Yes, those are different things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE754#Basic_formats
I am well aware of the difference between base 2 and base 10.
You asked "why not just use doubles?" And my answer is "because one often multiplies by powers of ten."