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dsign • today at 7:12 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

Kind of shocking that a 1980 chip could do 80 bits floating points. It makes me a little mad at all of those microcontrollers from this year, 46 years later that ship without floating point support or, at best, 32 bits, but they do come with a "secure island" and a radio capable to ring ET.


Replies

jart • today at 8:31 PM

Yeah even NASA doesn't need that many bits. Ken said it himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971913

shakna • today at 8:16 PM

Espressif did finally added back an FPU to the ESP32-S3. (The original ESP32 also has one).

They tried, with the H- and P- lines to effectively make it a paid extra over the regular productions. At least they accepted when the market disagreed.

russdill • today at 8:13 PM

But they can, it's just not accelerated by hardware built specifically for the task