Penalties of errors in SSE floating point calculations

SSE provides not widely known control register, called MXCSR. This register plays three roles:

1. controls calculations:
• flag "flush to zero" (described later)
• flag "denormals are zeros" (described later)
• rounding mode (not covered in this text)
2. allow to mask/unmask floating-point exceptions
3. save information about floating-point errors - these flags are sticky, i.e. the programmer is responsible for clearing them.

Floating point errors may cause significant slowdown, some of the flags can silence errors makes a program faster. Read more ...