December 2014
Intermediate to advanced
700 pages
16h 4m
English
CHAPTER 3
![]()
X87 Floating-Point Unit
The x86 platform includes a discrete execution unit that is capable of performing floating-point arithmetic. This unit, known as the x87 floating-point unit (FPU), employs dedicated hardware to implement fundamental floating-point operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It is also equipped to carry out more sophisticated computations using built-in square root, trigonometric, and logarithmic instructions. The x87 FPU supports a variety of numerical data types, including single and double precision floating-point, signed integers, and packed BCD.
This chapter examines the architecture ...
Read now
Unlock full access