The Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor, introduced in 1980, performed floating-point operations up to 100 times faster than early microprocessors, benefiting applications like AutoCAD and spreadsheets.
The 8087 was a complex chip with 40,000 to 75,000 transistors, featuring a datapath, constant ROM, microcode ROM, and stack-based architecture with eight 80-bit registers and tag bits.
Its stack design used a top-of-stack pointer and offset-addressing, but suffered from stack overflow issues and was difficult for compilers, requiring extensive workarounds like saving the full stack to memory.
Despite drawbacks, the 8087 was a commercial success, establishing Intel Israel and influencing the IEEE 754 floating-point standard; its stack approach was later replaced by SSE and AVX in modern processors.