Computer Hardware Terms, Glossary and Dictionary

8086, 8088 processors

The 8086 and 8088 processors were developed by Intel in 1979, which was selected by IBM in 1981 as the CPU for its first commercial personal computer. The Intel 8086/8088 range of processors were based upon Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) which allows the number of bytes per instruction to vary according to the instruction being processed. The architechture pioneered by Intel has become known as "x86" due to the early naming system where processors were called 8086, 80186 (not used in PC's), 80286, 80386, and 80486.

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8086, 8088 processors