The Intel 8087 design team, with Kahan as their consultant, who was the author of most novel features, based on his experience with the design of the HP scientific calculators, have realized that instead of keeping their new much improved floating-point format as proprietary it would be much better to agree with the entire industry on a common floating-point standard.
So Intel has initiated the discussions for the future IEEE standard with many relevant companies, even before the launch of 8087. AMD was a company convinced immediately by Intel, so AMD was able to introduce a FP accelerator (Am9512) based on the 8087 FP formats, which were later adopted in IEEE 754, also in 1980 and a few months before the launch of Intel 8087. So in 1980 there already were 2 implementations of the future IEEE 754 standard. Am9512 was licensed to Intel and Intel made it using the 8232 part number (it was used in 8080/8085/Z80 systems).
Unlike AMD, the traditional computer companies agreed that a FP standard is needed to solve the mess of many incompatible FP formats, but they thought that the Kahan-Intel proposal would be too expensive for them, so they came with a couple of counter-proposals, based on the tradition of giving priority to implementation costs over usefulness for computer users.
Fortunately the Intel negotiators eventually succeeded to convince the others to adopt the Intel proposal, by explaining how the new features can be implemented at an acceptable cost.
The story of IEEE 754 is one of the rare stories in standardization where it was chosen to do what is best for customers, not what is best for vendors.
Like the use of encryption in communications, the use of the IEEE standard has been under continuous attacks during its history, coming from each new generation of logic designers, who think that they are smarter than their predecessors, and who are lazy to implement properly some features of the standard, despite the fact that older designs have demonstrated that they can in fact be implemented efficiently, but the newbies think that they should take the easy path and implement inefficiently some features of the standard, because supposedly the users will not care about that.
So Intel has initiated the discussions for the future IEEE standard with many relevant companies, even before the launch of 8087. AMD was a company convinced immediately by Intel, so AMD was able to introduce a FP accelerator (Am9512) based on the 8087 FP formats, which were later adopted in IEEE 754, also in 1980 and a few months before the launch of Intel 8087. So in 1980 there already were 2 implementations of the future IEEE 754 standard. Am9512 was licensed to Intel and Intel made it using the 8232 part number (it was used in 8080/8085/Z80 systems).
Unlike AMD, the traditional computer companies agreed that a FP standard is needed to solve the mess of many incompatible FP formats, but they thought that the Kahan-Intel proposal would be too expensive for them, so they came with a couple of counter-proposals, based on the tradition of giving priority to implementation costs over usefulness for computer users.
Fortunately the Intel negotiators eventually succeeded to convince the others to adopt the Intel proposal, by explaining how the new features can be implemented at an acceptable cost.
The story of IEEE 754 is one of the rare stories in standardization where it was chosen to do what is best for customers, not what is best for vendors.
Like the use of encryption in communications, the use of the IEEE standard has been under continuous attacks during its history, coming from each new generation of logic designers, who think that they are smarter than their predecessors, and who are lazy to implement properly some features of the standard, despite the fact that older designs have demonstrated that they can in fact be implemented efficiently, but the newbies think that they should take the easy path and implement inefficiently some features of the standard, because supposedly the users will not care about that.