Reverse-Engineering the Intel 8087 Floating-Point Coprocessor's Stack Circuitry
By
elpocko
Slow-proofed and worth the wait. Worth its weight in flour.
Summary
The article details the reverse-engineering of the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip, examining its complex stack circuitry and internal architecture. It explains how the 8087 revolutionized floating-point computation in early PCs, providing 100x speed improvements for applications like AutoCAD and spreadsheets. The analysis covers the chip's transistor count, stack pointer implementation, and how it influenced modern floating-point systems.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledEarly microprocessors were very slow when operating with floating-point numbers. But in 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point coprocessor, performing floating-point operations up to 100 times faster.
The 8087 was so effective that today's computers still use a floating-point system based on the 8087.
The 8087 was an extremely complex chip for its time, containing somewhere between 40,000 and 75,000 transistors, depending on the source.
To explore how the 8087 works, I opened up a...
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