The Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction

Intel's 1087 chip, introduced in 1980, dramatically accelerated floating-point arithmetic in the IBM PC by speeding up addition by nearly 100 times compared to the 8086 processor. The chip uses specialized circuitry including an integer adder, shifter, and exponent converter to perform floating-point addition and subtraction on 80-bit values, with the shifter playing a crucial role in aligning values for calculations. The 8087's microcode ROM contains 1,648 micro-instructions that control these operations, enabling the high performance that made it a significant advancement in computer processing.