What is a Math Coprocessor?
A math coprocessor is a computer chip that handles the floating point operations and mathematical computations in a computer. In early PCs, this chip was separate and often optional, and was primarily used in computers where Computer Aided Design (CAD) was the primary focus. Personal computers as recent as the 386 PC had separate math coprocessors. In today’s computers, the math coprocessor is generally built into the CPU, allowing the core CPU to offshore the mathematical computations to its math coprocessor. This helps the CPU maintain more processes at one time because it can allow any math coprocessors present to handle these intense calculations. Applications on a PC like a CAD program or even a spreadsheet that deal with floating point units (FPUs) and calculations relay on a computer’s math coprocessor to assist in performing these calculations. This leaves the CPU more available for Operating System tasks and overall PC management. Think of the math coprocessor similarly to a c
Why is it necessary? Response #: 1 of 1 Author: lesz A math coprocessor is a piece of hardware closely related to the CPU of a computer. The CPU is in effect the brain of the computer. With out the CPU the computer is just a box containing electrical connections. Sometimes computers will use extreme amounts of CPU time to say run mathematical calculations given it by a program. As a result it bogs down the CPU … it has a hard time doing other operations such as keyboard entry (typing in letters) and the user sees a delay from the time they type in letters until the time they are displayed on the machine because the CPU is busy doing mathematical calculations for some other program. So the math coprocessor was developed to free the CPU from math intensive operations and thus let the CPU do the other operations it was intended to do such as input – output operations and the like. The math coprocessor then takes over these math operations and runs them. This hopefully makes the computer
