First of all, hope I've found the right forum for this question, if I haven't please pass me on to one which would fit better.

Out of curiosity from an argument with someone who may or may not be more into CPUs than I am. We were arguing about the performance of floating point operations on modern CPUs. Is there any source showing hard-ware performances regarding typical functions such as exp, sin, cos on modern processors? 


And in particular : can brute force computation compete with tabulation for these functions?