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FPU
Nowadays a FPU is built in in most CPUs, except for small ones that are used in embedded systems. Intel processors have them since the 80486; for the 80386 an optional FPU called the 8087 could be installed.
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FPU
FPU
FPU stands for Floating Point Unit. It is a coprocessor that performs calculations on floating point numbers much faster than the main CPU could. The machine code has special instructions that call the FPU to do calculations like +, -, *, / and transcendental functions like sin, cos, tan, log, ... On many systems it is possible to run such code without a FPU, when an FPU emulator is installed that performs the calculations with ordinary instructions, albeit slower.Nowadays a FPU is built in in most CPUs, except for small ones that are used in embedded systems. Intel processors have them since the 80486; for the 80386 an optional FPU called the 8087 could be installed.
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