alt Hacker NewsAIUI, 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.
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.
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.