In 1980, Intel released the 8087 floating-point chip, making math much faster. I'm reverse-engineering this chip, 46 years later. Most of its instructions are implemented in microcode, but some are implemented in hardware. Let's look at the circuitry that decodes instructions and decides what to do...

Did it have much speed up for 16 bit integer maths, or just Floating point (80 bit or 64 bit?)?

Ken Shirriff

@kenshirriff@oldbytes.space

The 8087 doesn't help with 16-bit integer math.

February 14, 2026 at 10:09:42 PM

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