A Mixed Precision FFT with applications in MRI

Abstract: A mixed precision Fast Fourier transform (FFT) implementation is presented. The procedure uses per-block microscaling (MX), a global power-of-two prescale, and prequantized low bit twiddles. We evaluate forward and round-trip FFT fidelity on two public MRI datasets and compare the effect of various low precision formats, image sizes, and MX block sizes on image quality. Results show that mantissa precision is the primary limiter under MX scaling while ablations suggest weak dependence on image size but a clear block-size trade-off with larger block sizes resulting in better numerical performance.