Microcode Inside the Intel 8087 Floating-point Chip: Register Exchange
owl writes:
https://www.righto.com/2026/05/microcode-inside-intel-8087-floating.html
In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point chip, a co-processor that made floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This chip was highly influential, and today most processors use the floating-point standard introduced by the 8087.
The 8087 uses complicated algorithms to accurately compute functions such as square roots, tangents, and exponentials. These algorithms are implemented inside the chip in low-level code called microcode. I'm part of a group, the Opcode Collective, that is reverse-engineering this microcode. In this post, I take a close look at the microcode for one of the 8087's instructions-FXCH-and explain how the microcode works. The FXCH (Floating-point Exchange) instruction exchanges two floating-point registers. You might expect this instruction to be trivial, but there's more going on than you might expect; the microcode uses 14 micro-instructions to implement the exchange instruction.
To explore the microcode, I opened up an 8087 chip and created a high-resolution image with a microscope. The large microcode ROM occupies a central position, holding the micro-instructions that control the chip. The microcode engine on the left steps through the microcode, handling jumps and subroutine calls. The bottom half of the chip is the "datapath", the circuitry that performs floating-point calculations; it is split into a 16-bit datapath for the number's exponent and a 64-bit datapath for the number's fractional part (also known as the significand).
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.