Coprocessor for floating point arithmetic
Also known as floating point unit · FPU
10 statements · 20% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations
7 identifiers linking floating-point unit across the web's reference databases
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0
A floating-point unit (FPU), numeric processing unit (NPU), colloquially math coprocessor, is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. Typical operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square root. Modern designs generally include a fused multiply-add instruction, which was found to be very common in real-world code. Some FPUs can also perform various transcendental functions such as exponential or trigonometric calculations, but the accuracy can be low, so some systems prefer to compute these functions in software.