Why is x**3 slower than x*x*x? [duplicate]

Answer 1

This is because powers in python are performed as a float operation (this is true for numpy as well, because it uses C).

In C, the pow function provides 3 methods:

double pow (double x, double y)

long powl (long double x, long double y)

float powf (float x, float y)

Each of these are floating point operations.