First launched in 1980, the 8087 was a math coprocessor designed for the Intel 8080/8086 microprocessors. It was used to speed up floating-point arithmetic operations such as square root, addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. For its time, the 8087 (which could perform 50,000 FLOPS on 2.3 watts of energy) was fairly successful, improving calculation speeds by 20-500% depending on the operations being performed.

8080, 8086, CPU terms

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