Author here for your 8087 questions...
Great work! I love to read your articles.
I'm curious to know - you say Intel's 8087 emulation code was a bit of a lump at 16KB, do you know if it emulated the 8087 microcode state machine or did it use a different strategy?
no questions, just thanks
That's a really vertical microcode. It looks more like a specialized assembly than microcode. I guess it makes sense, since the algorithms are so complex and executing one microinstruction per cycle (is that correct?) already provides almost an order of magnitude performance improvement.