Saturday, January 6, 2024

X86 floating point

80287 was the first floating point co-processor for x86. The floating point registers were organized in a stack architecture. Floating point instructions was handled by ESC opcode prefix. The performance has been lagging comparing to other CPU. Intel subsequently introduced SSE implemented with a traditional floating point architecture. SSE also allow loading of 4 single precision floating point data into its register and gave further speed up.

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