 the intel 8087, announced in 1980, was the first x87 floating-point coprocessor for the 8086 line of microprocessors. the purpose of the 8087 was to speed up computations for floating-point arithmetic, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square root. it also computed transcendental functions such as exponential, logarithmic or trigonometric calculations, and besides floating-point it could also operate on large binary and decimal integers. the performance enhancements were from approximately 20% to over 500%, depending on the specific application. the 8087 could perform about 50,000&nbsp;flops using around 2.4 watts. only arithmetic operations benefited from installation of an 8087; computers used only with such applications as word processing, for example, would not benefit from the extra expense (around $150 ) and power consumption of an 8087. the sales of the 8087 received a significant boost when ibm included a coprocessor socket on the ibm pc motherboard. development of the 8087 led to the ieee 754-1985 standard for floating-point arithmetic. there were later x87 coprocessors for the 80186 (not used in pc-compatibles), 80286, 80386, and 80386sx processors. starting with the 80486, the later intel x86 processors did not use a separate floating point coprocess
Intel_x86_microprocessors