Floating point co-processor

In Computer Science a Floating point co-processor is a coprocessor, a chip separate from a computer's central processing unit, that was capable of performing the computer's floating point operations.

Computer manufacturer Intel developed companion floating point co-processors for its Intel 8086, Intel 80186, Intel 80286 and Intel 30286 CPUs. The reason these early intel CPUs relied on floating point coprocessors was that floating point operations were so complicated to execute they required a huge fraction of a CPUs "silicon real estate". Intel's next CPU, the Intel 80486, did include floating point operations on the CPU, and those floating point areas required fully half of the CPU's area.