I am currently reading a chapter in a textbook on Processor Architecture and saw the following statement:The less precision there is, the less space is occupied by a program variable in memory. Further, there is often a time advantage, both in ferrying the operands back and forth between the processor and memory, and for arithmetic and logic operations that need less precision. This is particularly true for floating-point arithmetic operations.Why are less precise data like float sometimes faster than larger, more precise data like double? Can somebody develop on this explanation and maybe give an example?
Why can less precise data like float be faster than larger, more precise data like double?
cpu;floating point;register
For intuitively the same reason why it's faster to calculate 2 + 2 by hand than it is to calculate 3685 + 2193: there's simply less data to work your way through.