That's a good point - floating point operations are implemented with integer-math circuits (or at least can be - I'm not privy to how modern chip manufacturers

That's a good point - floating point operations are implemented with integer-math circuits (or at least can be - I'm not privy to how modern chip manufacturers implement them). E.g: your ALU may have an 11-bit adder specifically to add your f64 exponents. Some slides to get the gist of it: https://users.encs.concordia.ca/~asim/COEN_6501/Lecture_Notes/L4_Slides.pdf https://users.encs.concordia.ca/~asim/COEN_6501/Lecture_Note...