There are things like floating point exceptions (IEEE 754) and subnormal numbers (close to zero, have less precision than the small approximation error "machine-epsilon"). The idea is to degrade gracefully. These additional features require additional transistors and processing which raises latency.

If you really know (and want to know) what you are doing, turning this stuff off may help. Some people even advocate brute-forcing all 2^32 single floats in your test cases, because it is kind if feasible to do so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726919