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++ benchmark with a few kernels over arrays of 16384 values (small enough to fit in cache): multiply each value by 0.75, add t...