8087

First launched in 1980, the 8087 was a math coprocessor designed for the Intel 8080/8086 microprocessors. It was used to speed up floating-point arithmetic operations such as square root, addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. For its time, the 8087 (which could perform 50,000 FLOPS (floating-point operations per second) on 2.3 watts of energy) was fairly successful, improving calculation speeds by 20-500% depending on the operations performed.

8080, 8086, CPU terms