Inside the Intel 8087: A deep dive into the 69-bit adder that powered early floating-point math
By
pwg
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Summary
This article provides a detailed technical analysis of the 69-bit adder circuitry at the heart of Intel's 8087 floating-point coprocessor, released in 1980. The chip accelerated mathematical operations up to 100x and handled transcendental functions like tangent, exponentiation, and logarithms. The author explains the adder's nanomachine architecture, including its registers, shifters, and control circuitry, with die photos and circuit-level analysis.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledThe arithmetic heart of the floating-point execution unit is centered about a nanomachine comprised of the adder and its related registers, shifters and control circuitry, as the patent describes it.
In 1980, Intel released the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor, a chip that could make math up to 100 times faster.
As well as arithmetic and square roots, the 8087 computed transcendental functions including tangent, exponentiation, and logarithms.
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