What Is a Floating Point Unit?
A floating point unit is a functional block of a computer processor that performs floating point arithmetic operations. Also known by the acronym FPU, a floating-point unit can be a physically-separate co-processor as well. An FPU usually accesses data via the same addressing modes as the rest of the processor and generally includes its own registers. A processor uses an FPU to calculate trigonometric, logarithmic and basic floating-point arithmetic functions. It also uses an FPU to load, store and compare numbers in several integer and floating point data types. Many processors do not include a floating point unit. Most of the microprocessors produced by Intel Corporation and Motorola Incorporated prior to the late 1980s do not include one, for example. Many Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) processors and embedded controllers do not have one either. These chips do include an Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) to perform basic integer arithmetic and bitwise logic functions. Floating p
