system
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human
What does Math.Pow(x,2) do under the hood, that is much slower than x*x?

Hello, I am asking about C#
gpt
Math.Pow needs to be able to raise any number to the power of any other number, not just 2. It's instrinsically a much slower computation than just multiplying one number by another. CPUs generally don't even have a single instruction for raising an arbitrary number to an arbitrary power - they have instructions for taking natural logarithms, and raising *e* to the power of some number, so they combine them to do:

y = e\^(n*ln(x))