To be fair, those chips made multiply a single instruction, but they would take tens or hundreds of clock cycles to complete. What it really saved you was prec

To be fair, those chips made multiply a single instruction, but they would take tens or hundreds of clock cycles to complete. What it really saved you was precious working memory, no longer needing to consume a significant chunk of memory with a lookup table in order to multiply at a decent speed. If your platform has 16kb of working memory then a 2k lookup table is a huge ask. Even a small 512k lookup table is serious chunk of your memory budget, you have to really consider if wasting hundreds of clock cycles per multiply is a better option.