The adder at the heart of Intel's 8087 floating-point chip

(righto.com)

42 points | by pwg 2 hours ago

3 comments

  • throwaway152321 4 minutes ago
    Do you have any insights on how power was delivered to these circuits? Maybe it's done in the metal layers that were dissolved? Also, is it correct that there is no on die capacitance surrounding these circuits?

    Thanks for the great article.

  • kens 2 hours ago
    Author here for your 8087 questions. I find adders and ALUs interesting because they are key to the performance of a system and every system implements them differently.
    • Aardwolf 34 minutes ago
      Any idea how much adder designs changed on modern CPUs compared to back then? I mean there's only so much you can optimize in those, I think...
    • sebgan 1 hour ago
      No immediate questions, but happy to have some great weekend reading. A quick pass through finds one of the best and clearest explainers I've seen. Thanks for this and all the materials you produce.
  • oakinnagbe 1 hour ago
    [flagged]