Subnormal floating-point numbers are expensive on Intel processors

We represent floating-point numbers using the IEEE standard. For very small numbers, the standard uses special subnormal numbers. Unfortunately, they have a reputation of making operations slow. Thus video game programmers and machine learning specialists sometimes avoid computing with subnormal numbers for performance. How slow are they? Let me measure. I wrote a small C++ … Continue reading Subnormal floating-point numbers are expensive… on Intel processors