What is a Math Coprocessor?
A math coprocessor is a computer chip that handles the floating point operations and mathematical computations in a computer. In early PCs, this chip was separate and often optional, and was primarily used in computers where Computer Aided Design (CAD) was the primary focus. Personal computers as recent as the 386 PC had separate math coprocessors.
In today’s computers, the math coprocessor is generally built into the CPU, allowing the core CPU to offshore the mathematical computations to its math coprocessor. This helps the CPU maintain more processes at one time because it can allow any math coprocessors present to handle these intense calculations.
Applications on a PC like a CAD program or even a spreadsheet that deal with floating point units (FPUs) and calculations relay on a computer's math coprocessor to assist in performing these calculations. This leaves the CPU more available for Operating System tasks and overall PC management.
Think of the math coprocessor similarly to a computer’s Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This is a separate card that handles graphics rendering and can improve performance in graphics intensive applications, like games. The math coprocessor, though neither as costly nor as noticeable in most PCs, is the workhorse of the chipset for mathematical computations. Considering that the majority of a computer’s actions are mathematical or binary, the math coprocessor plays a very important role, even though it is typically unseen or unnoticed by any computer user.
Because newer computers include the math coprocessor as part of the CPU, its actions are not visible other than through overall CPU monitoring. While still optional, the fact that the math coprocessor is a part of the overall CPU does aid performance because programs that can make use of these functions will do so without user intervention. Comparing the performance of an excel spreadsheet on two computers, one with and one without a math coprocessor should show considerable improvement in performance where the chip is present, given the CPU chip speeds are the same.
Written by Derek Schauland
