Denormals happen to be the way that Zero can even be represented at all?

> This is not the first time we can see Nvidia taking shortcuts to achieve maximum performance of their GPUs

Why is implementing it correctly not performant? For context I have no idea how rounding is typically implemented anyways.

Another thing to keep in mind is that CPU processing of denormals tends to be extremely slow - I vaguely recall running into something like a 10x slowdown a decade ago.

For a lot of applications the difference between a denormal and zero is small enough to be irrelevant, so if you expect near-zero values to be common, enabling a denormals-to-zero compiler flag might give you a pretty nice performance boost for free.

Flush denormals to zero. Even their inventor had trouble writing correct code in their presence - see the Appendix to that "what every programmer should know..." paper

It's one of several issues with the design of IEEE floats, unfortunately. I wish we could start thinking more seriously about a new design, to complement if not replace IEEE in the long term. Posits are an example https://github.com/andrepd/posit-rust