Intel 8087

The Intel 8087, announced in 1980, was the first x87 floating-point coprocessor for the 8086 line of microprocessors.

The purpose of the 8087 was to speed up computations for floating-point arithmetic, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square root. It also computed transcendental functions such as exponential, logarithmic or trigonometric calculations. The performance enhancements were from approximately 20% to over 500%, depending on the specific application. The 8087 could perform about 50,000 FLOPS using around 2.4 watts. Only arithmetic operations benefited from installation of an 8087; computers used only with such applications as word processing, for example, would not benefit from the extra expense (around $150 ) and power consumption of an 8087.

The sales of the 8087 received a significant boost when IBM included a coprocessor socket on the IBM PC motherboard. Development of the 8087 led to the IEEE 754-1985 standard for floating-point arithmetic. Later Intel processors (introduced after the 486DX) did not use a separate floating point coprocessor.