1. A method for using a microprocessor's native floating point instructions to manipulate 16-bit floating point data representations, comprising: providing a 16-bit floating point data representation having a sign bit, an exponent and a significand; converting the 16-bit floating point data representation into a floating point format native to the microprocessor; performing an operation on the native floating point representation using at least one of the microprocessors floating point instructions; and converting the native floating point data representation into a 16-bit floating point data representation.