- The Metal Ages is a term for the period of human civilization beginning around 6,000 years ago in which metallurgy rapidly advanced and human populations started using metals such as copper, tin, bronze and finally iron, to make tools and weapons. By heating and shaping metals in hot furnaces, people also learned to use precious metals such as gold and silver to make intricate jewellery.
- Conditions in the Intel 8087 floating-point chip’s microcode (righto.com)
In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip. Plugging it into your IBM PC would make operations up to 100 times faster, a big boost for spreadsheets and other number-crunching applications. The 8087 uses complicated algorithms to compute trigonometric, logarithmic, and exponential functions. These algorithms are implemented inside the chip in microcode. I’m part of a group that is reverse-engineering this microcode. In this post, I examine the 49 types of conditional tests that the 8087’s microcode uses inside its algorithms. Some conditions are simple, such as checking if a number is zero or negative, while others are specialized, such as determining what direction to round a number.