The Bloatware Co-Processor

By Chris Morley
January 29th, 2007

Once upon a time PCs were terrible gaming platforms. *gasp* Why, you ask? Well, beside the obvious lack of horsepower or gaming-centric graphics accelerators, the CPUs were simply not capable of processing in hardware the necessary floating-point math required for today’s games. Starting with the 80386, consumer desktop PCs were the first to benefit from a symbiotic, pseudo dual-core technology that included a second processor for handling these math-intensive calculations. While this processor could not stand on its own or even allow the system to perform multi-threaded instructions, it did intercept floating point instructions and could decode them in hardware. And boy-oh-boy did video games get a boost. Eventually the x87 floating point co-processor went the way of the dodo when its function was integrated in the 486 processor, although stripped down versions of the CPU did not include the FP unit. Anyone who owned an Intel processor with the SX designation knows it was ...

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