Talk:Coprocessor

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of Computing WikiProject, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to computers and computing. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received an rating on the importance scale.

How CO Processor Works.. Whether it read All instructiuons given to CPU or CPU will instruct this if any FPU operations Come...

--I added some information about a new unit called the PhysX, which I believe functions like a co-processor in that it offloads physics computations from the CPU. - fredtorrey

[edit] Cart before horse

Somehow I doubt that there was no demand for floating point calculations before the coprocessor came along - but rather once integration got cheap enough, there was no more money to be made by having separate FP-less and FP versions of processors. The article has a bit of cart before horse feeling about it now. --Wtshymanski 23:26, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Minor discrepancy

The 8088 actually can't trap FPU opcodes when no coprocessor is present (in fact, it can't trap invalid opcodes at all) - this is only possible with 286+. This necessitated building the floating point routines directly into the application (or even having separate binaries), as no interrupt trap emulation could be done. - bigbadbrad at gmail —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.165.105.105 (talk) 03:54, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] CPU is not a processor

I think that the article assumes that CPU = processor, but that isn't true. Citation: "Sometimes an entire computer is made out of coprocessors instead of a single CPU." I think this is a whole nonsense, as CPU is a term of von Neumann architecture - a piece of a computer which is often implemented by a microprocessor. I assume if the computer consists of two so called coprocessors, so they are CPU or even can be called processors. (I don't get it: How something can be a "co"processor if there's nothing in there to what this "co" item would assist in operation.) AleyCZ (talk) 18:04, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

I removed the offending statement. In the case of the Emotion Engine, the VPUs (coprocessors) receives instructions from the MIPS core. It is impossible for the Emotion Engine to run on the VPUs alone. All coprocessors cannot operate independently without a host - this includes GPUs and FPGA-based accelerators like the SGI RASC. If anyone can prove that an Intel 8087 can operate without an 8086 (or any other coprocessor), they get a cookie! Rilak (talk) 08:42, 8 June 2008 (UTC)