The adder at the heart of Intel's 8087 floating-point chip

88 pointspwg7 hours ago25 commentsView on HN

kens7 hours ago

Author here for your 8087 questions. I find adders and ALUs interesting because they are key to the performance of a system and every system implements them differently.

sebgan7 hours ago

No immediate questions, but happy to have some great weekend reading. A quick pass through finds one of the best and clearest explainers I've seen. Thanks for this and all the materials you produce.

Aardwolf5 hours ago

Any idea how much adder designs changed on modern CPUs compared to back then? I mean there's only so much you can optimize in those, I think...

kens4 hours ago

Even by the time of the Pentium, they had moved to much more complicated adders like Kogge-Stone. I wrote about it here: https://www.righto.com/2025/01/pentium-carry-lookahead-rever...

B1FF_PSUVM1 hour ago

Do you have anything on those TRW floating point chips that used to titillate junior engineers in trade mag advertisements before that?

rcxdude3 hours ago

There's a surprising amount of optimization possible in them. You can improve the latency of them substantially at the cost of a lot more transistors.

B1FF_PSUVM1 hour ago

For example, an adder's total delay depends on a carry chain. If you have N 4-bit slices, the last slice has to wait for the carry to propagate through all N-1 previous slices.

But if you duplicate all your slices, you can have the results for both carry = 0 and carry = 1 inputs. Then just switch which one is correct - total time 1 add plus N-1 switches.

Just for double (and change) the hardware. Cheap.

m13335 hours ago

> take two clock cycles to complete an addition.

How does the clocking work exactly? The circuit is fed A and B and up down up down clock and then the output appears? How does the consumer (circuit) know when to read the result? Is there a "result is ready" flag? How long does the result stay stable? One full clock cycle? So many questions...

JdeBP4 hours ago

The adder is not clocked. You can see from the diagrams that there are no clock inputs. The clock cycles comment is more an expression of the length of time that it takes before all of the carry rippling and whatnot settles down.

kens4 hours ago

In more detail, the microcode engine normally executes one micro-instruction per cycle. For addition, the engine is blocked for one extra cycle to give the result time to percolate through the adder.

There is some complicated timing within a clock cycle with slightly delayed clocks and whatnot, for instance, to precharge the carry lines at the beginning of the operation. The 8087 is mostly synchronous with the clock, but they "cheat" in many places.

mitthrowaway24 hours ago

Do you know about how many transistors are needed to implement the adder (or the FPU as a whole)? And how it scales with the width of the numbers (16 bit, 32 bit, etc)?

I've been curious about transistor counts for floating point units for a while, but it's hard to find information about them.

kens4 hours ago

I count approximately 2014 transistors (including pull-ups) for the 69-bit adder. Each block of four bits takes approximately 117 transistors.

throwaway1523215 hours ago

Do you have any insights on how power was delivered to these circuits? Maybe it's done in the metal layers that were dissolved? Also, is it correct that there is no on die capacitance surrounding these circuits?

Thanks for the great article.

kens3 hours ago

The 8087 has one metal layer, which makes power distribution more challenging. You want to keep power distribution in the metal, so for the most part the pattern is two interdigitated trees for power and ground. There are a few places where the lines need to cross, which is accomplished with a short polysilicon connection underneath. The two clock lines are also kept in metal whenever possible.

The die photo at the start of the article shows some of the power distribution (the thick white lines around the edge and through the die). I have a close-up shot of the adder's metal layer in the article, showing the thick power and ground metal lines that run next to the adder.

As far as capacitors, there are some capacitors for specific things, but no decoupling capacitors. I think the capacitors are mostly to tweak the timing, if a signal needs to be delayed slightly.

nine_k5 hours ago

/* It's a bummer that there is addition but no vipition. */

ErroneousBosh4 hours ago

I knew a guy who bred snakes but could never really get much out of his adders.

Turns out what he needed to do was saw up some tree trunks to make rough platforms for them, and they bred like crazy.

Adders can multiply really efficiently with log tables.

inigyou4 hours ago

slow clap

Sharlin2 hours ago

(It's an old, old joke.)

inigyou1 hour ago

and my slow clap processor made it into this thing

JdeBP4 hours ago

It is interesting that over the years people have produced synthesizable RTL HDL for the 8086/8088 and later, with varying degrees of fidelity, but no-one seems to have produced similar for the 8087.

colejohnson664 hours ago

The ROM used different sized transistors to store two bits per transistor. That's pure analog territory, which most HDLs don't touch.

JdeBP4 hours ago

And largely irrelevant if the goal is synthesizing something that can be put onto an FPGA to be a workalike for the 8087. It's almost never about synthesizing the exact original hardware to be fabricated. See CPU86 and Zet, for examples:

* https://github.com/nsauzede/cpu86/wiki

* https://github.com/marmolejo/zet

jcranmer4 hours ago

AIUI, the 8087 was essentially at the extreme cutting edge of what was possible to produce with the technology of the time, and even Intel at the time was largely treating it as a likely-to-fail project.

JdeBP4 hours ago

That's not really an explanation of why the people who have made synthesizable 8086/8086 processors haven't done the same thing for the 8087, because modern FPGAs aren't limited by the cutting edge of 1980 technology. (-:

My educated guess is that primarily simply no-one has needed this, and secondarily it's hard. They're running softwares that can do all of their floating point in software anyway and they just don't need an 8087 on an FPGA. And floating point on an FPGA uses a lot of area, if one is taking the easy route of just emulating the external behaviour rather than the much harder task of emulating the clever microarchitecture that reduces it all to just 1 adder.

userbinator2 hours ago

A lot of applications where an embedded x86 core makes sense don't have a huge need for FP maths.