[CaliforniaKarl]

Hello! In your view, did the move to IEEE 754 floating-point make things easier or harder for CPU designers?

[kens]

My guess is that it made things both easier and harder. Harder in the sense that you couldn't just throw together floating point circuits; you had to deal with lots of special cases. But easier in the sense that the tricky design decisions were already made for you. And easier to test against a known standard.

[monocasa]

For what its worth, Intel was one of the major contributors to IEEE 754. In a lot of ways the original 8087 behavior became an early IEEE 754 draft.