Sadly, without an accompanying FPGA-implementation of an FPU it's much less useful for productivity work/research, i.e. outside of 08/15 gaming and application fare. Same with Ao486, which only implements a 486SX.
I think there are two reasons we haven’t seen an FPGA FPU yet, especially for MiSTer.
First, FPUs are complex and FPGA support for floating point is limited. There's DSP blocks for integer additions and multiplications. But very little FP support.
Second, the CPU itself may not be fast enough for an FPU to matter much. Quake wants at least a 75 MHz Pentium, while ao486-MiSTer is closer to a 486-66. So we probably need both a faster CPU design and a faster FPGA. Maybe Altera's new Agilex 5 will be useful here.
Aye. Well, hopefully something comes to pass as a lot of industry-specific applications demand the (emulated) physical presence of an FPU. Keeping that in mind, it's obviously high-level bitching (as we say in Germany); I, as a fan of IBM PCs and compatibles, am very fascinated by your and others' awesome work in this domain.
> a lot of industry-specific applications demand the (emulated) physical presence of an FPU
Can you name some? I cant come up with any real world uses of FPU implemented PC for industrial use. Even MISTER is pushing it considering availability of emulation.
What I've personally seen that needed an FPU: a water analysis package for a "field laboratory" (its centerpiece being a luggable PC), several in-house applications of an insurance company (which my mentor, a mathematician, coded), as well as a bespoke, modular sasec (safety and security) suite for facility management. I'm slowly building a reference list of DOS- and UNIX-based industry software, as I have an interest in that stuff. Can't help with any names. Yet.
So much for needed. Packages that run without, but are only fully useful with an FPU, were relatively common.
First, FPUs are complex and FPGA support for floating point is limited. There's DSP blocks for integer additions and multiplications. But very little FP support.
Second, the CPU itself may not be fast enough for an FPU to matter much. Quake wants at least a 75 MHz Pentium, while ao486-MiSTer is closer to a 486-66. So we probably need both a faster CPU design and a faster FPGA. Maybe Altera's new Agilex 5 will be useful here.