floating-point accelerator

floating-point accelerator

(hardware)(FPA) Additional hardware to perform functions onfloating point numbers such as addition, multiplication,logarithms, exponentials, trigonometric functions andvarious kinds of rounding and error detection. A floatingpoint accelerator often functions as a co-processor to theCPU.

The term "floating-point accelerator" suggests a physicallylarger system, often an extra circuit board, whereas a"floating-point unit" is probably a single chip or even partof a chip.