As per answer, the reason float is faster than in is because a) hardware companies provide float ALUs than integer ALUs and b) float FMA is a thing, while integer FMA isn't. Both are because currently most HPC-like loads use floats instead of integers, not because of intrinsic hardware reasons.

If it's desired integer performance could far exceed float performance, since ALUs need less die area than FPUs.

If this paper holds, I'd expect that's where custom accelerators will be heading.

Oh, I agree, I'm just saying that there is no reason in principle for floats performance to be better than integer.

edit: also this might be implementable purely using bitwise vector operations. Would need to check the throughput of those.