On 5/16/2016 8:15 PM, Era Scarecrow wrote:
Speed in theory shouldn't be that big of a problem. As I recall the FPU *was* a separate processor; Sending the instructions took like 3 cycles. Following that you could do other stuff before returning for the result(s), but that assumes you aren't *only* doing FPU work. The issue would then come up when you are waiting for the result after the fact (and that's only for really slow operations, most operations are very fast, but my knowledge/experience is probably more than a decade out of date).
With some clever programming, you could execute other instructions in parallel with the x87.
