The posit is a compressed floating point encoding with a flexible data structure with a trade-off of precision (the number of bits after the dot) and magnitude

The posit is a compressed floating point encoding with a flexible data structure with a trade-off of precision (the number of bits after the dot) and magnitude (the absolute value). It uses more hardware because the posit is decoded into a floating point larger than a equivalent IEEE754 with the same number of bits. So, the logic units needs to be larger.