From LaurieWired.

Fading out audio is one of the most CPU-intensive tasks you can possibly do!

When numbers get *really* small, the number of CPU operations can explode 100-fold. Both x86 and ARM have special CPU instructions just to handle it. But why?

In this video, we’ll explore the IEEE 754 (floating point) standard, the fight between Intel and DEC, and I’ll write some demonstration C++ code that illustrates this problem even today!

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Timestamps:

00:00 Subnormal Arithmetic Cost
02:25 An Accuracy Debate…
06:28 Too small to calculate?
08:56 IEEE 754 Standard
10:17 Digital Audio Workstation Conundrum
14:18 A Massive CPU Spike

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Papers Cited:

"An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point":
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754story.html

Pentium 4 and Xeon Processor Optimization manual (Chapter 5, “Optimizing for SIMD Floating-point"):
https://kib.kiev.ua/x86docs/Intel/Intel-OptimGuide/248966-004.pdf

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Short demo code:
https://gist.github.com/LaurieWired/3f8be4648b3e627e3fcd5607d83b405f