What are the applications/benefits of an 80-bit extended precision data type?

Question

Yeah, I meant to say 80-bit. That\'s not a typo...

My experience with floating point variables has always involved 4-byte multiples, like singles (32 bit),

Answer 1

Wikipedia explains that an 80-bit format can represent an entire 64-bit integer without losing information. Thus the floating-point unit of the CPU can be used to implement multiplication and division for integers.