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by JoeAltmaier
48 days ago
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Special sauce? Yes. It could do floating point on a chip.
CPU's didn't have that, not the microprocessor kind. They were 'micro' which meant, barely any room for the registers, instruction decode and execution units. The float point instructions on the 8086 were explicitly to manipulate the 8087. An unexpected issue with the 8087 was, it caused issues when multi-processing. That is, any kernel with a process scheduler had to swap the 8087 state along with the rest of the registers. |
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