But why? That is the question I was looking to understand. Why is it inherently slower?

I imagine it's because binary exponents correspond very well to binary arithmetics, while decimal exponents don't.

Imagine you have a floating point format which has 8-bit mantissa (i.e. 8 bits to store the digits, without the floating point). You're trying to calculate 200 + 200. In binary, that's

    0b11001000 + 0b11001000 = 0b110010000

However, to represent the result you would need 9 bits, which you don't have, so you instead represent it as 400 = 200 * 2 = 0b11001000 * 2 ^ 1. Notice how the resulting mantissa is just the result (0b110010000) shifted one bit.

If your exponent is decimal exponent, you would instead have to represent 400 as 400 = 40 * 10 = 0b101000 * 10 ^ 1. In this case, the resulting mantissa has to be calculated separately (using more expensive operations), as it has no connection to the mathematical result of the operation.

Because division/multiplication by powers of two is a simple bitshift and can be implemented very easily on silicon. Division/multiplication by ten is complicated and needs many more gates and more time.

division/multiplication by powers of 2 is not the only thing people do with binary floating point numbers.

Yeah, but you need that to do anything with binary floating point numbers, like a simple addition.

It's not inherently slower, however you have to add extra logic to correctly handle overflows and the like. However given the size of modern floating point units I doubt it's a massive overhead. Basically they would need to convert back and forth between the native zeros and ones of hardware and the decimal representation. And extra logic might mean slower hardware in certain circumstances.

Basically try to implement a BCD counter in verilog and you'll see where the overhead appears compared to a "dumb" binary counter.

In practice it would be slow because not a whole lot of CPU architectures natively handle BCD. If this "standard" goes mainstream maybe the vendors will adapt and make special purpose "DEC64 FPU" hardware.

I'm not really sure what's the point of using this floating point format outside of banking and probably a few other niche applications. For general purpose computing I see absolutely no benefits.

It's not inherently slower. It's a question of economics. How much are people willing to spend to get a CPU to make it be fast? With IEEE 754 math, there's a lot of monetary incentive because a lot of code uses 754. With a new decimal class, there is much less inventive.

Because it's easy to do things in base 2 with binary signals (like the kind used in computers). It's unnatural to use base 10 for anything in this domain.

It would be extremely unintuitive if math could be done faster in any base except for 2 (or a power thereof) when running on a modern CPU.

Aligning the decimal point can be done in a single cycle with a barrel shifter in base 2.

That's what he said, and he's asking why.