Apple doesn't use the x87 floating point unit. They've never needed to because they can rely on the SSE2 unit since any Intel Mac ever created has one. This isn

Apple doesn't use the x87 floating point unit. They've never needed to because they can rely on the SSE2 unit since any Intel Mac ever created has one. This isn't necessarily the case on the PC even though every modern one will have it as well. I'm pretty sure gcc is set to compile floating point numbers using a SSE2 code-path by default on OS X.