80287

The Intel 80287 is a numeric coprocessor (NPU) that was designed to work with the Intel 80286 microprocessor. It was released in 1982 and was later upgraded in 1985. The 80287's primary function was to accelerate floating-point arithmetic operations, which were computationally intensive for the main CPU. This offloading allowed the 80286 to perform other tasks more efficiently, leading to overall system performance improvements in applications that heavily relied on mathematical calculations.

The 80287 supported the IEEE 754 standard for floating-point arithmetic, which became the industry standard for representing and manipulating real numbers in computing. It featured a set of specialized instructions for performing operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, and trigonometric functions on floating-point numbers. This significantly sped up tasks in scientific computing, engineering simulations, graphics rendering, and other specialized software.

Different versions of the 80287 were available, offering varying clock speeds to match the 80286 processors they were paired with. While the 80287 was a significant advancement, its successor, the 80387, offered even greater performance and a more advanced instruction set for the 80386 processor. The 80287 was a crucial step in the evolution of microprocessors, demonstrating the benefits of dedicated hardware for specific computational tasks.