Since early microprocessors were designed to operate on integers, arithmetic on floating point numbers was slow, and transcendental operations such as trig or logarithms were even worse. But the 8087 co-processor greatly improved floating point speed, up to 100 times faster.
The benefits of floating point hardware are so great that Intel started integrating the floating-point unit into the processor with the 80486 80486DX in 1989.
See: [https://www.righto.com/2018/08/inside-die-of-intels-8087-coprocessor.html Inside the die] [https://www.righto.com/2018/09/two-bits-per-transistor-high-density.html High-density ROM] [https://www.righto.com/2020/05/extracting-rom-constants-from-8087-math.html Extracting ROM constants] [https://www.righto.com/2020/05/die-analysis-of-8087-math-coprocessors.html Fast bit shifter] 8087 FPU reverse engineered