6.5 Floating-Point Arithmetic
When the 8086 CPU first appeared in the late 1970s, semiconductor technology was not to the point where Intel could put floating-point instructions directly on the 8086 CPU. Therefore, Intel devised a scheme whereby it could use a second chip to perform the floating-point calculations—the floating-point unit (or FPU).[102] By the release of the Intel Pentium chip, semiconductor technology had advanced to the point that the FPU was fully integrated onto the 80x86 CPU. Therefore, almost all modern 80x86 CPU devices fully support floating-point arithmetic directly on the CPU.
6.5.1 FPU Registers
The 80x86 FPUs add 13 registers to the 80x86: eight floating-point data registers, a control register, a status register, a tag ...
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