I have no idea. I'm just speaking from experiences from the "old daze".
I wuz using Excel to do some numerical modeling and couldn't explain to my boss why there were these oscillations as things approached Zer0. Later I found out that M$ had pimped me.
Some linux distros have a problem with advanced floating point routines. They quietly fail and fall back on (MUCH slower) kernel FP. Try explaining to your boss that your laptop can run the FP calcs twice as fast as the new, shiny server with a flakey distro. ;)
/johnny