Gregory's Server@jalefkowit when was Hardware Floating point support added? AFAIK even the 386 has a companion chip for that. And it was not easy to support environments with and without floating point hardware in the same program because of a missing interrupt for "instruction not implemented " or "illegal instruction"
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 @jalefkowit @grauzone IIRC the 487 was just a 486DX with an extra pin, and it would disable the 486SX entirely when you put it in the "coprocessor" slot. So more expensive and more complicated in terms of total hardware in the system, but not really more complicated wrt hardware "in the loop". |
@grauzone Intel CPUs didn't get an FPU on-board by default until the 486, and even then they offered a cheaper 486SX version that didn't include the FPU. (There was an 80487 add-on FPU for that one, but if you started with a 486SX and added a 487, you just ended up with a more complicated, more expensive 486.)