Motorola 68881

The Motorola 68881 and Motorola 68882 are floating-point units (FPUs) used in some computer systems in conjunction with Motorola's 32-bit 68020 or 68030 microprocessors. These coprocessors are external chips, designed before floating point math became standard on CPUs. The Motorola 68881 was introduced in 1984. The 68882 is a higher performance version produced later. The 68020 and 68030 CPUs were designed with the separate 68881 chip in mind. Their instruction sets reserved the "F-line" instructions – that is, all opcodes beginning with the hexadecimal digit "F" could either be forwarded to an external coprocessor or be used as "traps" which would throw an exception, handing control to the computer's operating system. If an FPU is not present in the system, the OS would then either call an FPU emulator to execute the instruction's equivalent using 68020 integer-based software code, return an error to the program, terminate the program, or crash and require a reboot. The 68881 has eight 80-bit data registers (a 64-bit mantissa plus a sign bit, and a 15-bit signed exponent). It allows seven different modes of numeric representation, including single-precision floating point, double-precision floating point, extended-precision floating point, integers as 8-, 16- and 32-bit quantities and a floating-point Binary-coded decimal format. The binary floating point formats are as defined by the IEEE 754 floating-point standard. It was designed specifically for floating-point math and is not a general-purpose CPU. For example, when an instruction requires any address calculations, the main CPU handles them before the 68881 takes control. The CPU/FPU pair are designed such that both can run at the same time. When the CPU encounters a 68881 instruction, it hands the FPU all operands needed for that instruction, and then the FPU releases the CPU to go on and execute the next instruction. The 68882 is an improved version of the 68881, with better pipelining, and eventually available at higher clock speeds. Its instruction set is exactly the same.