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The interesting thing about the 8087 is that the co-processor interface was kind of generic. In theory you could have had things beyond just an FPU, but I don't
by bombcar 6mo ago
The interesting thing about the 8087 is that the co-processor interface was kind of generic. In theory you could have had things beyond just an FPU, but I don't know if much was ever done using it.
- bobmcnamara 6mo agoPre-Cortex ARM CPUs were the same way. Chips did fit crypto engines, matrix multipliers, FFT offload, and color converters there.
- duskwuff 6mo agoSome of them still do. RP2350 has a couple of custom coprocessors, for instance.
- bobmcnamara 6mo agoCool! What do they do? Edit: double precision floating point and fixed latency GPIO at least!
- duskwuff 6mo agoThat's two of them - there's also a "redundancy coprocessor" which implements security features like stack canaries and flow control assertions. (As well as the standard ARM single-precision FPU.)
- alnwlsn 6mo agoThere was an 8089 I/O co-processor. I'm not sure what used it, maybe if you were making some kind of realtime data acquisition system?
- bombcar 6mo agoIt'd be fun to shoehorn some incredibly (relatively) powerful device as an 8086 copro - maybe an early GPU or something that could communicate slow enough.