In very old CPUs and in many microcontrollers, floating-point operations are slower than integer operations. However, in many old but not very old CPUs, e.g. i

In very old CPUs and in many microcontrollers, floating-point operations are slower than integer operations. However, in many old but not very old CPUs, e.g. in many from the last decade of the 20th century and from the first decade of this century, floating-point multiplication and division were much faster than integer multiplication and division. So for those CPUs, which include models like Pentium 4, or even the first Intel Core models (those older than Nehalem, which got a dedicated integer multiplier), there were many cases when converting an integer computation into a floating-point computation could increase the speed many times.