“CORDIC is an algorithm for computing trig functions like sin, cos, tan etc on low powered hardware, without an FPU (i.e. no floating point) or expensive lookup tables.”
CORDIC turns sine and cosine into shifts and adds on 16.16 fixed-point integers. No FPU, no lookup table, just vector rotations that converge. Microcontrollers and FPGAs still need it. “Floating point is a crutch” is a hot take until you ship to a chip without one.