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In the same way that CPUs are ASICs for integer operations, that makes sense to me.



Most CPUs do just fine on floating point too.


I'm still getting used to that.


Floating point arithmetic _is_ integer arithmetic on the cpu level because of how floating point numbers work.


That's a good point - floating point operations are implemented with integer-math circuits (or at least can be - I'm not privy to how modern chip manufacturers implement them). E.g: your ALU may have an 11-bit adder specifically to add your f64 exponents.

Some slides to get the gist of it: https://users.encs.concordia.ca/~asim/COEN_6501/Lecture_Note...




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