Why denormalized floats are so much slower than other floats, from hardware architecture viewpoint?

Question

Denormals are known to underperform severely, 100x or so, compared to normals. This frequently causes unexpected software problems.

I\'m curious, from CPU Architect

Answer 1

Denormals are not handled by the FPU (H/W) in many architectures - so that leaves the implementation to s/w

There's a good basic intro here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denormal_number

Under Performance issues -