Notes

It is used with the INTEL® 8086, or the INTEL® 8088, microprocessors to extend their instruction sets with over 100 instructions (not counting addressing mode).

In addition to high performance, great care was taken to ensure that the 8087 could be used in any application involving numbers-including commercial calculations. This required an unprecedented level of accuracy and reliability to be built into the processor. The intent was to greatly simplify the production of high performance but reliable numeric software.

For example, the above formulas for the quadratic roots will be far less sensitive'to roundoff error if evaluated on the 8087 instead of a typical computer.

Another important aspect of the 8087 is that it is an implementation of a very carefully designed standard, proposed to the IEEE and destined to be emulated by many other manufacturers. The establishment of this standard will go far to provide an environment for experts to produce ever more reliable software. Until now most experts, in an attempt to produce portable code, have written for a mythical computer whose capabilities are an intersection of the capabilities of all major computers and whose arithmetic is a collection of all the ugliness of any of them. Thus these programs, while useful for everyone, are ideal for no one. Assuming a standard environment, professional programmers will be able to concentrate on optimizing the code since portability will be automatic.