The interesting thing about the 8087 is that the co-processor interface was kind of generic. In theory you could have had things beyond just an FPU, but I don't know if much was ever done using it.

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alnwlsn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There was an 8089 I/O co-processor. I'm not sure what used it, maybe if you were making some kind of realtime data acquisition system?

	▲	bombcar 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It'd be fun to shoehorn some incredibly (relatively) powerful device as an 8086 copro - maybe an early GPU or something that could communicate slow enough.

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bobmcnamara 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Pre-Cortex ARM CPUs were the same way.

Chips did fit crypto engines, matrix multipliers, FFT offload, and color converters there.