GoKawiilBenchmark shows subnormal floating-point math slows Intel Xeon chips far more than AMD or Arm rivals
A developer benchmarked how Intel, AMD, Arm and Apple processors handle IEEE 754 subnormal floating-point numbers—the tiny values near zero that require special handling. Testing double-precision arithmetic on Intel Granite Rapids and Emerald Rapids Xeons, AMD Zen 5, AWS Graviton, and Apple M4 Max chips, the results showed Intel processors suffer dramatic slowdowns, sometimes 40-plus times slower, when computations involve subnormal values compared to normal ones.