If floating-point hardware is not provided on a computer, then instructions may be provided to help with the programming of floating-point arithmetic subroutines.
And in January, the same board ruled that using generic terms like "processor" and "floating-point hardware" was not sufficient to tie the invention to a specific machine.
The Intel 80486DX processor included floating-point hardware on the chip.
The fixed-point implementation is ideal for embedded systems and mobile devices, which often lack floating-point hardware.
The SIC machine does not support floating-point hardware and have at most 32,768 bytes of memory.
Some floating-point hardware only supports the simplest operations-addition, subtraction, and multiplication.
But even the most complex floating-point hardware has a finite number of operations it can support-for example, none of them directly support arbitrary-precision arithmetic.
Of course, the addition of floating-point hardware meant the addition of floating-point instructions.
The first commercial computer with floating-point hardware was Zuse's Z4 computer designed in 1942-1945.
It is simply not possible for standard floating-point hardware to attempt to compute tan(π/2), because π/2 cannot be represented exactly.