alt Hacker NewsLooking at the complexity and area of hardware floating point, I often wonder why we don't see more unified combined integer+floating point units, like done in the R4200 [1], which reused most of the integer datapath while just adding a smaller extra smaller 12-bit datapath for the exponent.
The integer pipeline is often needed for address calculation near the same time as the floating point pipeline.
The R4200 FPU performance suffered for this reason.