Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on July 13, 2020 1:29 am wrote:
> I like my cheap and fast FPU, but fully recognize that I got it due hitchhiking gamers.
>


And I wonder how much of the use of the FPU for certain things has been driven by "because we know it is there"?

If an FPU was still an extra cost option like in the 387 days (let's say Intel fused it off and varied by SKUs so like many of their own features you had to buy a higher dollar processor to get them) then a lot of the stuff being cited as examples would go away.

People wouldn't write Javascript that depended on floats if they knew a chunk of their audience wouldn't be able to view those pages, or would have terrible performance emulating floats with ints. PDF might have been modified from its postscript roots to rely on integers instead of floating point since they couldn't depend on people viewing PDFs having FPUs available. And so on.

For some uses floating point use of floating point may be the path of least resistance for the programmer, and offer better performance than integers, but if the programmer was forced to use integers it wouldn't make any real difference in the overall development time nor in the performance unless the FP is done in an inner loop of code that's often executed.

Obviously none of this is relevant in today's world where we can assume even a sub $50 smartphone has a FPU, but a lot of the day to day use for people who don't exercise one of the obvious FP cases like number crunching or Adobe photo/video stuff is probably somewhat gratuitous.