Nat (she/they)

Number = IEEE-754 double precision float, which includes NaN, so it makes sense

Could definitely be worse for latency in particular cases, but if we imagine a write heavy workload it still might win. Writing a byte/word basically has to do the same thing: read, modify write of cache lines, it just doesn’t confuse the dependency tracking quite as much. So rather than stalling on a read, I think that would end up stalling on store buffers. Writing to bits usually means less memory, and thus less memory to read in that read-modify-write part, so it might still be faster.

A lot of times using less memory is actually better for performance because the main bottleneck is memory bandwidth or latency.