Floating point operations is slower when small values are used?

Question

I have the following simple program that multiplies two different floating point numbers many times. As you can see, one of the numbers is very small. When I calculate the time of executing both multiplications, I was surprised that the little number takes much longer than the other one. It seems that working with small doubles is slower... Does anyone know what is happening?
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
        long iterations = 10000000;
        double result;
        double number = 0.1D;
        double numberA = Double.MIN_VALUE;
        double numberB = 0.0008D;
        long startTime, endTime,elapsedTime;
        //Multiply numberA
        startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
        for(int i=0; i < iterations; i++)
            result = number * numberA;
        endTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
        elapsedTime = endTime - startTime;
        System.out.println("
        System.out.println("Number A)
Time elapsed: " + elapsedTime + " ms");
        //Multiply numberB
        startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
        for(int i=0; i < iterations; i++)
            result = number * numberB;
        endTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
        elapsedTime = endTime - startTime;
        System.out.println("
        System.out.println("Number B)
Time elapsed: " + elapsedTime + " ms");
    } Result:
Number A) Time elapsed: 3546 ms
Number B) Time elapsed: 110 ms
Thanks,
Diego

Answer 1

Verrry interrresting... After a few tweaks (sum & print multiplication result to prevent Hotspot from removing the entire loop, move stuff to one method to avoid code alignment effects or such, loop to get Hotspot compile everything; code below),
I find that "java -server" gives the same times for both the small and the big value, whereas "java -Xint" and "java -client" exhibit the unsymmetry. So should I conclude that my CPU floating point unit treats both values the same, but the client/server compilers do something ...what?
(You may need to add or remove a zero in "iterations" so that you get sane times with -client and -server.)
public class t
    public static void main(String[] args)
     for (int n = 0; n < 10; n++) {
         doit(Double.MIN_VALUE);
         doit(0.0008D);
    static void doit(double x)
        long iterations = 100000000;
        double result = 0;
        double number = 0.1D;
        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
        for (int i=0; i < iterations; i++)
            result += number * x;
        long end = System.currentTimeMillis();
        System.out.println("time for " + x + ": " + (end - start) + " ms, result " + result);
}