title: Why denormalized floats are so much slower than other floats, from hardware architecture viewpoint?
body: <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denormal_number#Performance_issues" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Denormals</a> are known to underperform severely, 100x or so, compared to normals. This frequently causes <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2487653/avoiding-denormal-values-in-c/2487733#2487733">unexpected</a> software <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9314534/why-does-changing-0-1f-to-0-slow-down-performance-by-10x/9314926#9314926">problems</a>. </p>
  
  <p>I'm curious, from CPU Architecture viewpoint, why denormals have to be <strong>that much</strong> slower? Is the lack of performance is intrinsic to their unfortunate representation? Or maybe CPU architects neglect them to reduce hardware cost under the (mistaken) assumption that denormals don't matter?</p>
  
  <p>In the former case, if denormals are intrinsically hardware-unfriendly, are there known non-IEEE-754 floating point representations that are also gapless near zero, but more convenient for hardware implementation?</p>